The work involved in telling computers what to do is markedly different than it was even five years ago, and it's quite possible that any Rip Van Winkle-like developer who slept through the past 10 years would be unable to function in the today's computing world.

This is quite possibly the stupidest article ever posted to Slashdot.

Ok, this month.

I like how you recognized that the "brogrammer" stereotype contradicts the "socially maladjusted" stereotype, so you had the presence of mind to frame the "brogrammers" as only managers.

specialized IT services firm

Is it Wipro? I have heard such good things about Wipro.

It basically boils down to "cool" people mad that the "uncool" people have more status than them.

And they wouldn't dream of "occupying" Apple or Google, it's too far from the city and they'd look like hypocrites. Hippies tend to have more iPhones than mutual funds.

I think the real truth is that developers are specialized and like to look down on anyone not in their specific specialty

Only morons do that. You almost get the point I'm making, but you confuse domain knowledge with programming.

Knowing how memory allocation works is not freakin' domain knowledge, at least not to any programmer worth a damn. It's basic year one stuff. It's programmer potty training. If you don't understand it then it means you're happy treating the whole software stack as a magic black box. It means you had a deficient education.

I know I have a wider exposure to that stack than most people, having worked on virtual machines and embedded systems, but for fuck's sake, I learned how malloc worked in school. I was able to pick these things up on the job because I had a solid background in CS.

ask a driver developer to write a video game (what I do) and he knows fuck all about 3D, 2D, GPU optimizations

You have a really dim understanding of the kind of people who do driver development. You think GPU optimization and game engine design isn't the sort of thing that gets their dick hard?

Probably because the only people who care, and care so much they trumpet it from the rooftops in books like this, and get all passive aggressive with their "just asking questions" and whining about "political correctness", are dumbass racists.

Those who can write in Java, and those who can write Java.

Or those who can write in C#, and those who can write the .NET runtime.

Or those who can write in PHP, and those who can create PHP. Wait, those are the same.

You get what I'm saying. The programmers who whine about requirements to understand low-level memory management are in the first category, and their knowledge and skills are laughable compared to the kind of programmers who get hired by the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Stop trying to pretend you're as good. If you were as good you'd be doing something interesting instead of slapping together enterprise bloatware.