The world seems glutted with mediocre, overconfident, one-trick-pony, “front-end engineers” (which pisses actual engineers off) while the industry is starving for people who have even basic terminal skills.
For example, one absolutely brilliant person gave an “Creating Helm
Charts” presentation to 90 technical professionals and used Notepad++
and Windows file explorer to change files even though they use kubectl
and docker from the command line. This person had not learned the mv
command. (That actually happened).
That example is fucked up and there’s a reason it is.
“Hackers” are using bloated, shitty, overpriced, proprietary Java apps for fuck’s sake and barely know the terminal or even how to code. They couldn’t even name the seven network layers. Some even brag about their lack of a clue publicly on YouTube and still rake in the views.
Again, that’s fucked up.
Somehow we have all got this entirely backwards. We are somehow taught that applications development is synonymous with web and mobile development. It’s just not. It’s so fucking not.
Because of this way too many technologists never learn these essential solid foundational skills. Instead, they learn web development first because it is the most ubiquitous and empowering (which it is). So the industry has come to view terminal and server-side Linux and programming skills as “extra” or stuff to “finally” learn after learning whatever else they find important.
To be fair, for more than seven years I started most people out with JavaScript because it is the most empowering and ubiquitous language for most people. You can use it anywhere without installing anything. Just open your web browser and boom, you have an interactive JavaScript session any time you want it. You still need to learn that, everyone does, but that’s not all you need to learn to have a solid foundation on which to build other things.