The article doesn’t acknowledge that “programmer” and “software developer” or whatever describe not only aptitude and technical skill, but also specific areas o

The article doesn’t acknowledge that “programmer” and “software developer” or whatever describe not only aptitude and technical skill, but also specific areas of focus and domain expertise. A competent web developer would probably struggle changing to a systems programming or enterprise application development environment. I have friends who work in machine learning and data science and other than Python syntax our skills have almost no useful intersection. Experience may not matter a whole lot in terms of reciting algorithms or language syntax, but those are the necessary but not sufficient skills for a programmer in the jobs market. This point is illustrated by the comment about endianness. Yes, that’s irrelevant trivia for web developers, but crucially important for compiler writers. I mostly work in web development. I wouldn’t expect a database expert or data scientist to answer “Explain what request, response, and stateless mean in the context of HTTP.” I would expect a web developer to know that. Sadly my experience actually interviewing web developers tells me that few can explain HTTP.