Hacker News

Great article and just as relevant today. Probably more so, honestly.

Even in the software engineering profession, there's a lot of that kind of illiteracy going on. Not to the extent of thinking their computer is off because the monitor is off. But for instance:

• Not thinking to narrow down the problem they're having to whether it's a problem with their build script(s) or a problem with their IDE. ("It's got red squigglies" means it won't build, right? If I had a nickel for every time a developer on my team came to me with red squigglies saying they'd tried X, Y, and Z changes to the build script without even trying to run a build from the terminal to see if that worked (and when they did try that at my suggestion, it did build just fine), I'd've invested in a piggy bank by now.)
• Writing/modifying code, but just having no idea (or desire to have any idea) how to start an application from scratch, tweak any of the code/processes that deploy the application (let alone build new processes for deploying), troubleshoot at least some issues with dependencies/libraries (for instance, by consulting the source code of FOSS dependencies), etc.
• Spending hours writing a web app in Java or whatever to do some simple thing that would be a 30-second Bash one-liner. (Or 10-minute Bash one-liner including learning curve.) Just because they don't think it's... feasible?... to learn how to write, say, a for loop in Bash.
• Writing/maintaining the back end of web apps daily but having zero understanding of the HTTP protocol or JS.

And of course, this isn't everyone. And I don't expect anyone who has just finished their college degree to show up to their first day of work knowing how to generate their own certificate authority using OpenSSL on the command line in less than 5 minutes, fully understanding every step of the process. But the above examples are all pretty senior folks. And some folks come straight out of college and pick that sort of stuff up extremely quickly. So, it's not just about how much experience they have.