You hear very often that the programmer industry is &quot;age-ist&quot;, in other words, the older programmers have a hard time getting hired.<p>This post is the other side of the coin: older programmers think that when they entered the industry it was &quot;the golden era&quot;, and everything since then has gone downhill. This is akin to someone in the late &#x27;90s asking all entry-level programmers &quot;you mean, you don&#x27;t regularly disassemble your object code to verify that the compiler did the right thing? What&#x27;s wrong with you, why are you relying on your tools so much?&quot;<p>The fundamental issue is that the industry is maturing, but the names of the positions for which you are hiring hadn&#x27;t quite kept up with what you are looking for. People whose primary job is to make sure that data gets from the database to HTML and back really don&#x27;t need to know what is under the covers. This position is called &quot;product programmer&quot;. Their job is to translate whatever your UX guy cooked up into things that actually work. If you then need to make sure that whatever they made scales up to thousands of requests, you need to have a different person called a &quot;performance developer&quot; - these people really hate translating UX wireframes into code, but once that part is done, they can optimize everything up and down the stack with their eyes closed.<p>Also, this is a personal pet peeve of mine: if you are asking what a singleton is in a job interview, you are interviewing for the wrong thing, so no wonder you are getting the wrong interviewees.