You're right about the current generation of programmers, but there might be more to it than "kids are lazy these days". Those programmers don't know much about system programming and assembly but they know about Java/C#, Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Unix command line tools, Windows, maybe a GUI toolkit or two, etc. The software world has been building layers of abstractions over the years to accelerate development of richer applications and it's just natural that we find more people working at higher level of abstractions today than before.