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.