| I agree. An ideal is far from reality. I like to get deep into low level stuff, but my employer doesn't care if I understand how a system call works or whether we can save x % of y by spending z time on performance profiling that requires good knowledge of Linux debugging and profiling tools. It's quicker, cheaper and more efficient to buy more hardware or scale up in public cloud and let me use my time to work on another project that will result in shipping a product or a service quicker and have direct impact on the business. My experience with the (startup) business world is that you need to be first to ship a feature or you lose. If you want to do something then you should use the tools that will allow you to get there as fast as possible. And to achieve that it makes sense to use technologies that other companies utilise because it's easy to find support online and easy to find qualified people that can get the job done quickly. It's a dog-eat-dog world and startups in particular have the pressure to deliver and deliver fast since they can't burn investor money indefinitely; so they pay a lot more than large and established businesses to attract talent. Those companies that develop bespoke solutions and build upon them have a hard time attracting talent because people are afraid they won't be able to change jobs easily and these companies are not willing to pay as much money. Whether you know how a boot process works or how to optimise your ELK stack to squeeze out every single atom of resource is irrelevant. What's required is to know the tools to complete a job quickly. That creates a divide in the tech world where on one side you have high-salaried people who know how to use these tools but don't really understand what goes on in the background and people who know the nitty-gritty and get paid half as much working at some XYZ company that's been trading since the 90s and is still the same size. My point is that understanding how something works underneath is extremely valuable and rewarding but isn't required to be good at something else. Nobody knows how Android works but that doesn't stop you from creating an app that you will generate revenue and earn you a living. Isn't the point of constant development of automation tools to make our jobs easier? EDIT: typo |