I share this sentiment, it's kind of a bummer. I ran into this non-stop in enterprise Java/C# development environments, more specifically in developers who are not "classically schooled" (i.e. bootcampers). Fact of the matter was, they never needed to know about pointers to do their job. They only even knew the term from the "null pointer exception". I looked into the curriculum of various levels of IT studies and unless you get taught at university level there are little to no memory / hardware oriented classes. It has started to get a bit better since the introduction of Java 8 (don't look up how long ago this was, ouch) and people got familiar with "lambda's".