This should be higher. I actually went through this. The president of our division, which was the highest level the comment was reflective of, brought it up at a division wide all hands. Except that he didn't get it!. I wrote a point by point commentary trying to explain what I thought the post writer meant (I was not the post writer). I subsequently was asked to meet with management, but ultimately they did not address the problems at hand, but they went away eventually with a wholesale management change.

Obvious exaggeration is obviously exaggerated.

@NicHartley You might know how to dereference a pointer, but there are many others who do not. I have heard quite a few software engineers with computer science degrees on the job saying "I did not know what a pointer was until I was put on this project and had to figure it out fast. They never taught us what a pointer was in college." Like you, I knew what a pointer was before college since I learned C++ from books while I was a teen, but apparently lots of people don't know even after graduation.

@NicHartley The biggest selling point of Java 20 years was to stop calling pointers "pointers", and make people dereference them without even realizing they're doing it. And look how big they got on "make scary things disappear" strategy. So, Ertai's phrasing is not actually an exaggeration - most of devs starting careers today hardly know what "pointer" and "derereferencig" is even though they're doing that all the time. The lack of devs is being handled by lowering the job requirements. If you don't move your stack toward "fisher price" techs, you're limiting your hiring options.

@NicHartley It's not about what people are being taught. We're being taught lots of things we chose to forget. It's about knowledge that people want to remember because they find it useful in real life.

@NicHartley The biggest thing college is not teaching you is that solution no matter how good is unacceptable if it's over budget. I actually work for banks and nobody uses C here. It's all C# or Java and memory security is provided at the firewall. Business is not about 100% coverage, it's about cheapest adequate coverage and the remaining risk gets insured at best. Finances are particularly keen on doing proper risk analysis and most often it's cheaper to insure than to secure.

@NicHartley It depends where you live I guess, in my area many companies are struggling to find developers, let alone developers who know skill XYZ

@Agent_L Just because some technologies make it easier to ignore issues other technologies allow you to focus on, doesn't mean they are easier or lower level. They simply have a different focus. Java may hide a lot of "fiddly details" under the hood, but you still need to tune its engine (jvm), you need different knowledge and you can focus on different aspects, e.g. business logic and algorithms. They are both tools and as a good dev you should know what tools to use for your problem. But that's also my problem with this answer, C++ as an example for "old legacy tech stack" is ridiculous.

@mattumotu there's a general lack of good developers in many areas, but that doesn't mean it's because they all lack the skills you need. There's also a lack of good developers for "modern" tools, where you don't "need to know pointers" as it was put. It's generally a time of high skilled worker demand in many regions.

@NicHartley Also, a surprising chunk of developers don't have formal CS education. insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/… ~20% of respondents didn't have a degree. ~35% of those with a degree weren't majoring in "Computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering". So that's very roughly 40% of devs that didn't have a CS degree.

@NicHartley I had a formal CS education and definitely learned pointers.. I probably learned to dereference them but I don't know because it was completely irrelevant to my professional life for the past 6 years and I have forgotten it as such. I suspect it's harder than you think to find a dev who knows how to do it without looking up a guide online. It depends very much on the career path you take and the vast majority of devs likely don't need to think about such things.

@Agent_L I also work for a bank and our main in-house risk pricing engine is about 10 million lines of C and C++. It has legacy pieces from the 90s and it has new parts written in C++14 leveraging GPUs with an emphasis on performance. Hiring bright young C engineers who understand pointers doesn't seem to be difficult at all. Across the financial sector there are many other big players (e.g., Bloomberg) who have large C++ codebases that aren't going to be deleted any time soon. Not saying your experience is invalid; but I am saying that I don't think it's completely indicative of the industry.

@AndyJ 40% of developers not having a CS (or related) degree does surprise me, yes, but only because most employers are snobbish about wanting people to have a degree. The fact 40+% developers can develop without a degree is not surprising. Most of the best devs I know are self-taught, not college taught. I have worked on many projects, from custom NoSQL databases to GUI, from video games to complex military software... I have never had a task I could not have done with the knowledge I had in high school. My CS degree was never needed. All you need is a few good books and a little practice.

@Aaron I suspect there's quite a bit of variations between global regions too. In the UK most programming jobs are "degree, or equivalent experience". It's an interesting topic, and one which seems to be have quite a cultural basis to it too.

@NicHartley - I learned some C/C++ as a teen too but my CS curriculum at a major university never once mentioned pointers. I'm glad yours did, but that doesn't mean your experience is universal. Also, I haven't needed to use a pointer in over a decade of professional work but I'm well aware that's due to the nature of the work I'm doing

I want add that pointers are not limited to C and C++, modern languages like Golang and Rust also have pointers, it is unlikely that pointers will be forgotten anytime soon.