Straw man. I’m encountering sys admins and systems “engineers” who don’t know how to spec out a server, don’t understand how certificates work, don’t understand basic IP addressing principles, don’t understand basic networking topology.

They just know how to click a list of specific buttons in a GUI for one specific Corpo vendor.

Maybe that is fine for a Jr. Admin just starting out, but it isn’t what you want for the folks in charge of building, upgrading, and maintaining your company’s infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with making interfaces simpler and easier to understand. And there’s nothing wrong with building simplified abstractions on top of your systems to gain efficiency. But this should not be done at the cost of actual deep understanding and functionality.

The people you call when things go badly wrong will always be the folks that have that deep understanding and competency. It already has started hitting the developer community in the last few years. The Jr. Devs that did a 3 month boot camp where they learned nothing but how to parrot code and slap APIs together, are getting laid off and cannot find work.

The devs that went to school for Comp Sci, that have years of real world experience, and actually understand the theory and the nuts and bolts of the underlying tech, they are still largely employed and have little trouble finding work.

I think the same will happen soon in the IT world. Deep knowledge and years of dirty, greasy hands will always be desirable over a parrot that only knows how to click GUI buttons in a specific order.