This is far deeper a crisis than I get the impression is being understood by these comments. This is a serious economic issue for each and every business going

This is far deeper a crisis than I get the impression is being understood by these comments. This is a serious economic issue for each and every business going forward, because they are the future employee pool. I've been working in software development for 40+ years, where I was lucky to work on multiple high profile projects. The last 25 years I've worked with a lot of recent graduates at both undergrad and graduate levels, due to consulting for their startups and places they work. I've been considering it a covid cognitive impact, but my one person's experience I know is unreliable. I have found basic indirection is an issue with recent graduates, as in "pointers are hard", which on first exposure sure, but years later? More than one level of indirection, and they have to stop and reason it out. I've never considered memory management difficult, and the push for "memory safety" to be more about selling software than actual "safety"; but for recent graduates they are afraid of handling their own memory, and could not if they tried; too many levels of logical indirection active at once. Working with soon to graduate software interns, their reliance on AI is dangerous - they don't know their fundamentals, and are masking that lack of understanding so they'll never really know. The real issue is a lack of cognitive flow: asking for a description of their work, their reply does not logically flow. It jumps around, meanders, maybe answers the question, maybe not. After a while they just stop talking like they ran out of words. I'm not saying this to be a "me too, get off my lawn" comment. This is a serious, nation in crisis level issue. It part of why our politics is so haywire: it's not just recent graduates, our educational system has been manufacturing people like this for about two decades.