Spring Boot is making you a worse developer. There. I said it. Don't get me wrong, Spring Boot is incredible. But it's so good at hiding complexity that most developers never learn what's happening underneath. You use @Transactional without knowing what a transaction isolation level is. You use @Autowired without understanding the bean lifecycle. You call JpaRepository.save() without knowing if it's an INSERT or UPDATE. And it works. Until it doesn't. Then you're debugging a production issue at 2am with zero clue why your transactions aren't rolling back. The developers who truly master Spring Boot are the ones who went DEEPER — not just learned more annotations. They understand: → How the Spring container actually works → What @Transactional is actually doing at the bytecode level → Why lazy loading is a performance trap if you don't understand Hibernate's session lifecycle Spring Boot is a superpower. But superpowers without understanding are just luck. Hot take or hard truth? Drop your opinion below. 👇 #Java #SpringBoot #BackendDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #JavaDeveloper #Programming #TechCareer #CleanCode
I respectfully disagree. Spring Boot doesn’t make you worse, it actually enables learning and growth when used thoughtfully. In fact, some points in your post seem contradictory. Spring Boot hides boilerplate and simplifies complexity, freeing developers to focus on design, architecture, and problem-solving. That’s empowering, not harmful. Using @Transactional, @Autowired, and similar features isn’t ignorance, it’s a deliberate entry point. You use them because you understand their purpose, and you can gradually explore the internals as needed, which is often how deeper understanding naturally develops. In practice, many so-called “nightmare debugging” situations aren’t caused by Spring Boot itself, but by skipped tests, insufficient monitoring, or misunderstandings in business logic. Spring Boot is a tool, the skill comes from how you use it.
In AI era, this is not even a discussion anymore...Springboot is meant for what it does, it reduces complexity so we can develop products faster. AI is doing the job now and there is not other way to come back in a near future.The question to make is: do you want to become a product developer or a technology developer?
Your post title is deceptive. To use springboot, you must understand Java, DI, IOC, annotations, aspects, hibernate, jpa, jdbc, even spring core itself, which are not simple or easy to learn. And nobody who has learnt all these things, is gonna just annotate an interface, class or method with transactional without knowing what it does.
Spring is to software development what McDonald’s is to cooking. Fast, familiar, and good enough when you need something quickly — but a poor substitute for actually learning how to cook. And that may be the most interesting consequence of all: If AI turns Spring into boilerplate, what happens to all the developers who learned how to use Spring, but never learned how to model a domain? Because once the annotations, wiring, repositories, and framework ceremony are commoditized, what remains is the part that always mattered: understanding the business and designing software around it. Software development was never really about the framework, the tooling, or even the language. It is about designing the story the software needs to tell.
I agree that Springboot is an efficient framework it makes work easier but having an understanding of how it works internally goes a long way during production,deployment and overrall maintainance of the project. To add a question is it possible within maybe 3 or 4 months one learning the depth of a language while the other one learns while continuing creating projects since i find most people creating projects with Ai tools fast but dont truly understand the internal workings of the project ?
I’ve seen this post circulating a few times already. Always good to aim for original content.
Build an app with plain java can be accepted in a job interview. But in real work this will never happen. This is a new AI era. Everything is changing. For example I'm creating a complete AI driven startup with agents. The discussion you mention makes me feel 20 years in the past.
Spring Boot doesn’t make developers worse. it accelerates development by abstracting complexity. However, relying on it without understanding underlying concepts like transactions, persistence, and the Spring container can lead to gaps that surface in real-world scenarios. True expertise comes from balancing productivity with a solid grasp of the fundamentals.
In an AI era, when some non-IT writers can generate thousands line of executable code with a prompt, you blame Springboot just because it hides some verbose code? If an engineer want to exist in this AI era, he automatically need to know all basic thing, at least.
Here's the question I really want you to think about: If Spring Boot disappeared tomorrow and you had to build the same app with plain Java + JDBC — how far would you actually get? Not to say you should. But if the answer makes you uncomfortable, that's exactly the point. 👇