> 90% of the developers and IT staff I work with are GUI only.
That's terrible - especially the part about the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery. I hope you can find a way to demonstrate your skills to a talented team who in turn can offer sane working conditions.
> the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery.
It is terrible, but very common in my experience. It is the success recipe for Apple to a large degree.
Software houses are something different, but if you change to another industry as inhouse dev, the priorities change drastically. It has advantages and disadvantages, but in industry jobs outside of software people just cannot really evaluate the quality of your work. It just needs to look shiny to a degree.
I don't think it's an issue of talent. But a preference for GUIs often hampers people and the work they support. You can't compose GUIs like you can CLIs, and that's important as your workflows become more complex and need to involve more things. You can either extend the GUI (Hah! only if you own it or it's open source) or develop manual processes, or use tools that can automate GUIs but tend to be fragile.
That is terrible. As a "boss" of an SRE team, we only use the GUI for groking, testing (in a sandbox account), and for a handful of _documented_ things that have to be done in the GUI (usually account wide settings). Everything else, in every "real" environment is in source control, we use Terraform.
That's terrible - especially the part about the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery. I hope you can find a way to demonstrate your skills to a talented team who in turn can offer sane working conditions.