Most of your time isn't spent in fundamentals though. I find a lot of my time is spent looking up some kind of best practice, or discovering what libs other peo

Most of your time isn't spent in fundamentals though. I find a lot of my time is spent looking up some kind of best practice, or discovering what libs other people are using for a problem. Also, things may be fundamental, but not everything is built up from fundamentals. Maybe math is the best place to look at this. When you go to school, you just do it. Number lines, equations, calculus, matrices. Even through the engineering course I did, which had all sorts of advanced topics, nobody mentioned ZFC or Peano or Cantor or anything like that. And while it's true that if you dig under the stuff that you get taught there's a whole interesting world, it doesn't seem to stop anyone from using math. With coding, a lot of it is having the right attitude. Something's broken, I'm going to try to understand why and what other people have done to fix similar issues. There's a resourcefulness that beats classroom teaching in terms of usefulness. You want that person who is capable of understanding everything that might happen, what he needs to do to fix it, etc. That person is never going to know or have heard of everything to start with, but they can deal with things when they happen. But of course it's easier to test whether someone has heard of this or that thing. Perhaps this is why senior devs find it easier to get a job than junior ones, employers are more likely to think that they can work through issues.