[shubber]

I tend to think inherent in your reply is an idea that I only see with older developers: that we should actually understand the whole stack. Newer developers are content to let more and more of the development ecosystem be someone else's problem.

So, I empathize strongly, but I think the issue isn't that we need to use prothetics as much as the conventional wisdom is that "that's devops problem."

[nostrademons]

People have always been content to let parts of the development ecosystem be someone else's problem. It's only the boundaries that have shifted over time.

Today's webdevs consider the webserver and database to be black boxes that are just "there" to be used. The people writing those webservers and databases in the 90s and 00s usually considered the OS and compiler to be black boxes that were somebody else's problem. The people writing those OSes and compilers in the 70s and 80s considered the hardware to be a black box to be trusted (at least at a high level; they knew processor architecture, but I doubt very many thought hard about how to build a flip-flop, NAND gate, or multiplexer). The people designing those chips in the 50s and 60s considered the vacuum tubes and silicon wafers to be black boxes; you don't think very much about how your silicon gets out of the ground, but that's a pretty huge project on its own.

[Cushman]

It goes past even that-- how many devs today do you figure see Rails as a black box?