I'm retired from the industry, and posts like these take me back to the early days of cybersecurity (where people memorized scripts). Talking with my nephews and nieces, I can already tell that many new grads struggle with fundamentals—things like choosing the right data types and containers for short-lived strings, understanding how memory allocation works, or even marginally improving a basic hashing function. I worry the next decade will bring an influx of undertrained engineers.

>>I worry the next decade will bring an influx of undertrained engineers.

How can it be the other way? No one is investing into education of their developers, also trying to save some money on them. Get cheap fresh grads and make them develop new stuff!

I agree understanding how memory allocation works, but not sure I would agree that understanding how to _improve_ a basic hashing function is very important.

As the "ceiling" grows, the "floor" of what's considered "fundamentals" moves in the same direction.