At least us old fogies have had the last 15 years to learn web development. How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years? I'm guessing half using youthful energy and the other half skipped in blissful ignorance?! :)
When I was starting out, I did design, frontend dev, backend dev, and ops work. Over the last 15 years these positions have all split into specializations: design was the first to go, then ops. The split between frontend and backend opened up in the middle of the last decade, and continues to split even further into controller and model devs on the back end and Javascript and CSS people on the frontend.
The increasingly popularity of frameworks stems from this specialization. It's more important than ever to have separation of concerns, because as apps get larger, individual devs are doing smaller and smaller sections of the work.
Young programmers don't know less than us -- they know way more than we do, but on a much narrower range.
And 'frontend dev' at the moment seems to be as malleable as a SEO was, sometimes it means a designer who can add jQuery and a couple of modules to a page, sometimes it means a talented javascript programmer with an in depth knowledge of HTML/CSS.
And young programmers can't know way more than older programmers, if you keep learning.
They don't. Witness the never-ending repetition of basic mistakes leading to SQL injection vulnerabilities, script injection, etc.
I mean I am lazy, but not so much that I would knowingly write insecure code for my customers; I'm can't imagine that many developers are different in that respect?
Part of this is that stacks that start off all light and fresh "we're not Struts!" before long acquire a few too many "must-have" features until, Lo! they are Struts.
Then it's time to drop that framework and find something more fresh, light, and lean, and enjoy it while it lasts.
Tipfy runs on the Google App Engine Python stack. It's a bit rough on the edges, but that's part of the fun.
I'm on my third full-time web development job and I now feel decently confident in my abilities. But yes: it's a big stack, and overwhelming. Everywhere I turn I see more things I don't know. I'm always reading and trying to improve.
Were there ever simpler times? It's an interesting thought to me. I find the constant challenge to be interesting, but admittedly, sometimes tiring.
Welcome to the museum of modern wheels -- we have every shape but round.
It's one of the reasons I still use PHP. It's the perfect balance between framework and coding.
