I’m not sure about the situation at Apple, but this is 100% true in the web development world today; with the exception that many of the new programmers hired straight out of General Assembly and the like can’t implement a DFS algorithm either.
It’s a nightmare for security and performance - the number of obvious, blatant security issues I’ve spotted and fixed just through luck alone is horrifying.
I'm sorry, but I don't know what "General Assembly" is. I live in the US, so is this some part of a degree program in your country (if you live somewhere else) that I'm not aware of?
But coming back to your point, there have always been new engineers with weak skills, just like there have always been smart engineers as well. I don't think the choice of programming language changes this fact significantly, although certain languages may have a slightly higher proportion of inexperienced programmers than others.
General Assembly is one of the popular US 3 month coding bootcamps. There are others in the US, but I’m not familiar with their carriculums.
As programming gets easier to learn, people spend less time learning programming. This has a number of negative knock-on effects, eg less understanding & focus on correctness, performance, security, etc. Obviously there’s lots of wider benefits too - but I suspect that the average person writing objective-c today spent more time studying programming than the average person writing swift today.
It sounds like we generally agree on that - but my claim is that this effect size is big enough to dominate almost all other considerations. I suspect the average C program is more secure than the average JavaScript web app, despite how the absurd difficulty in writing correct C, just because of the ratio of new and old programmers in both communities.
It’s a nightmare for security and performance - the number of obvious, blatant security issues I’ve spotted and fixed just through luck alone is horrifying.