It feels like many positions today don’t deal with things that you couldn’t learn in a 6 month boot camp aimed at a particular stack.
I did my computer engineering degree in the early 2000s, and we still had a lot of those early day concepts. All from digital electronics, to processor and compiler design. Lots of focus on the formal methods to prove the correctness of software. Plenty of programming paradigms. None of my professors had a degree in CS. There was no CS when they were studying. They all had math degrees and a love for logic and automata theory.
I can’t say that I’ve actively used it outside of academia, but I think that it has set me up to be a life long quick learner of everything happening in this fast-paced field. Most roles might be working with high level languages today, but those roles wouldn’t exist unless capable people build the compilers, drivers and hardware.
The field needs people who will comb through specifications instead of searching stackoverflow to figure out things. (I guess asking ChatGPT or copilot are the new stackoverflow)
I have a guilty pleasure in old things. The Computer Chronicles have all their episodes on youtube, and their analysis of the news in the 80s have held up remarkably well. I’ve also been reading Hollingdale’s Electronic computers. Computers are still just Von Neumann architecture no matter how many abstraction layers we build on top of it.
Consumer rights in the EU are pretty strong. They include two-week free returns, no questions asked, on things purchased online/remote.
These rights do not extend to businesses, though. Sounds like Amazon is not interested in being helpful unless legislation is twisting their arm.