We here at HN are quite probably not the norm. Being hobbyists that have been tinkering with computers since early childhood should not be a requirement to become a programmer. If it were, the industry would not be able to scale as it has. There are simply too few of us in the human population.
Define new. Programming has been known to pay well since at least the 1990s.
> Programming has been known to pay well since at least the 1990s. Known by whom? The median family in 1990 wouldn't even consider that programming as a career exists, much less that it pays well. At the dot-com boom in late 1990s, the adults would know that, but it wouldn't yet be "culturally assimilated" for the masses in the way the assumption about doctors and lawyers income was; and then you get the dot-com bust. I'd say that the time when the median high-schooler get told by all reasonable adults that "programming is a sure way to money for anyone, not just for weird geeks" doesn't arrive until 2000+ or even later; and from that time it takes ~10 years for that generation of kids to pass through school, college and fill the companies in great numbers.
In fact I didn’t know much at all about computer science other than some prerequisite class I was bored out of my mind in.
Gates was, however, on the Forbes rich list since the late 80s, and richest person in the world from 1995, so I find it hard to believe anybody really money-driven wouldn't have known this at the time.
I would consider myself a decent programmer I have a masters degree, and have a deep technical understanding of multiple areas. I've plenty of experience and have shipped successful products.
I've never (not once) in my life used a GUI ftp client, and I can futz my way around an SCP command to shuffle a file around if I need to.
I can make the same argument against someone who refused to use a new development environment because they understand how their compiler works under the hood.
Just because someone doesn't know something that you know doesn't mean that you're better than them, it means you're different. Personally, i would rather have someone on my team who understands how to extract logs from cloudwatch/datadog/new relic than someone who insists our VPN solution has FTP access to our servers.
Also, it is ok and to be expected for fresh graduates to have only knowledge in most important areas for them. Even people who want to learn a lot more then necessary are better off focusing on learning more in the immediate area they will actually use at first.
I've noticed something with boot camp programmers too.
Something that may have changed is that newer graduates may have studied programming because "it pays well", and not because they were computer hobbyists before deciding what to study.
I've been on meetings with some programmers that didn't know how to use a gui ftp client or how to manually upload a file to a server. Because most of that stuff is abstracted now.