i had always presumed my understanding of theory was weak because of my formal education in microelectronics -- instead of computer science -- plus my self-taught/ad-hoc education in implementing software for IT applications, and that this was the primary reason why some colleagues and management displayed a clearly resentful professional tolerance toward me while i was getting paid to be a software engineer.

but having to review actual vibe coding for the first time in my life; plus that earlier episode of piefed's bad security practices; has made me realize that they only directed that bile at me because i was proud to be a dirty "pinko" (their words). lmao.

I think a huge problem here is that AI removed a lot of the incentive to hire juniors. The "churn" of writing code is mostly solved, so senior engineers can now rejoice in perfecting software architecture and guiding/babysitting the LLMs to do the rest. Even if someone does hire a junior, they usually end up using an LLM themselves the output will be useless vibecoded shit, but a lot more of it than what the junior could type themselves, which wastes a lot of time for senior folks and is overall useless. Together this means that bosses will avoid hiring anyone without experience even harder than before.

However this also means that in 10-20 years when the current gen of senior engineers retire, there may not be anyone to replace them. No matter how much theory you learn (which I agree everyone in the profession must do), experience is priceless in software development.