[kaelinl]

People who must diagnose, modify, optimize, or establish procedures for operating the car think of it in the context of the system. Meanwhile, people who strictly want to move forward think of it as the accelerator.

Likewise for engineering tools. If you'd like to use a simple abstraction as your mental model, you'll be able to operate the tool in the basic sense without issue. But as engineers, when something goes wrong with our tools we often don't immediately bring it into a mechanic. We need our tools to do very specific things, and we must understand what they did each time we perform an operation. We establish workflows that build on top of the tools and depend on the tool matching our precise expectations of its behavior. In essence, we are the mechanic for our own car.

And of course, our needs are much more diverse than "make car go forward". So inevitably, we run into trouble more often. What user-facing function of a car is as precise, powerful or intricate as a textual merge or reconciling two diverged work histories? There are many ways those operations can be done, and questions the user must answer about their desired result.

[xboxnolifes]

Based on your first paragraph, it's not all engineers who need an indepth understanding of git. Only git engineers.