I think this and many of the comments illustrates part of the gap. If you are in the big tech companies doing infrastructure work (and to some degree, product

I think this and many of the comments illustrates part of the gap. If you are in the big tech companies doing infrastructure work (and to some degree, product work), then you need a very firm grasp of the basics because you will have to revisit them. The reason one has to revisit them in these companies is because scale will demand taking different evolutionary passes that are not needed in most other companies. What this does is create a barrier between jobs that pay crazy and the rest of the market that just need to cobble together a product. I actually experienced this many years ago when I assembled a hacker news meetup in the midwest. I felt rather isolated because most people were assembling some ruby website or some product while I wanted to build next generation infrastructure and write my own database. Now, the problem here is that ex-big-tech workers will bring the same processes from big companies to smaller scale. Small companies need to pick their battles, and they need to decide to educate and wield weaker engineers; most will not because that is expensive.