Comment by wyclif

[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.]

I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting.

One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that."

Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu."

So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come up with an answer, then you could legitimately ask for a senior mentor's time. Otherwise, the answer from the greybeards would have been "Get out of my face, kid. Go RTFM."

That system that used to exist is totally broken now. When reading and understanding technical documentation is viewed as "old school", then you know we have a big problem.