Agreed. Calling that 'pull style' is a little confusing to me, but ultimately the goal is totally right: we can model a web server as a function of an http request data structure (or object or whatever) that returns a response data structure. This makes handler / middleware composition the same as function composition, rather than requiring some kind of special chaining.

Well, they don't seem to be asking for any money. But how do they know they have 800 hours of training? That seems weird. It's probably a bunch of projects you have to do. Which, depending on the projects, could very well land you a job.

That's mostly what I've seen as well. Perhaps this is a suitable warning to novices, since "there be dragons" if you blithely wander into those waters. I received a similar warning when I was starting out. The effect of that was not to put me off threaded programming, but instead to try and piece something together without the help of my coworkers, since they'd all avoided doing any threaded code. I ended up writing a pretty awful system.

But now, if you're willing to do even a little bit of learning we have WAY better tools than we ever did for solving those problems. Channels / CSP systems, immutable data structures, java reducers or LinkedBlockingQueue, actors, maybe mapReduce, the list goes on.