@ljs As someone that you probably consider "young people" (1998) I can confirm this.
When I was in college I noticed how no one cared about learning to program at different levels. Every programming subject was focused on web application design using existing frameworks so you never needed to care about "how does this work".
I decided that was not what I wanted and started to learn other kind of programming i.e networking, operative systems, system engineering..
@ljs And in my 3rd year I landed a pretty good job. Other students were wondering how this happened.
Well, it turns out they were being set for lower-income jobs by the university itself. The reason behind that is that local companies are giving money to the research groups and influencing what they teach.
@ljs Yeah, when I was a young fellow at my first real job (or it was maybe my latest internship can't remember), I had this enlightening moment, during a discussion with a higher up management person. This person basically told me "But that should be done quickly right, what you guys do is just like assembling lego bricks together to make something bigger right?"....
@ljs ... Luckily for me this came early in my career as this helped me understand pretty much all of it, the low pay, the _this has to be done yesterday moments_, the "how come you are this senior and still coding?".
And now with AI, I mean, why can't an AI assemble lego bricks way better than human right?