I am arguing that they aren’t improving their skills in any regard, including how to properly use the tools they already pretend to know. They don’t go “deep” or “broad”, they don’t learn anything more than what they were taught in university.

I have had to debug a lot of concurrent Java, so my opinions are skewed towards that, but I have seen cases where “staff engineers” label every single function as `synchronized`, who genuinely don’t know why you would use a queue, have no concept of thread starvation or fairness, when to use an atomic instead of a mutex, and genuinely do not seem to understand that for network applications it’s generally more important to figure out how to reduce latency than trying to choose the optimal hashmap or sort implementation. These aren’t arcane details that require a PhD in category theory or require being constantly plugged into hacker news, these are extremely basic things that these Java engineers do not know.

I think most Java engineers, like more professionals in general, are very bad at their jobs. I think Java just selection-biases higher than other languages for people who are bad at their jobs.