I lack friends to discuss interests with. I want to study programming but have no peers in the field. They say “Hang around five billionaires, and you’ll become the sixth”, and I believe this statement is a crucial thing about personal development. Networking is not my strong point, and communities often gatekeep unexperienced newbies. So, how do I actually find interest-based buddies?
Fully agreed. We’ve all had those colleagues, and their lack of deep understanding of memory management propagates up the stack. </bad pun> Can a developer know only managed frameworks and still be good at their job? Absolutely, but in my experience they are the rarity. I think it is tricky to truly understand, say, garbage collection, reference/dereference, etc without understanding direct memory management.
Extending the driver aid metaphor, features such as ABS, traction control, and lane assist allow good drivers to use their finite attention on quality, rapid decisions. But those good drivers know how to handle the edge cases where the machine fails or is unable to handle the current situation. Managed frameworks are a bucket of super sweet driver aids. There are good reasons why .NET added pointers, because sometimes we need to disable the traction control. Weird COM Interops leap to mind. Sometimes you just need to grab control of that array and be able to do so in memory-safe ways.
And to throw myself under this bus, could I whiteboard a doubly-linked list in C++ with needed methods? Gawd, no, not in the time allotted to a tech interview. But I could spot the bugs in one in seconds.