I don't disagree with any of this, however the lack of breadth of knowledge is much more remarkable. Aside from security and hacking, I find Software Engineers lack bare metal and low level fundamentals in electronics and IT. Go ask your Software Engineer friends if they know how to change their IP address or if they know how to replace a PCIe card in a PC without using an online tutorial.
My first job was as a sys admin, and I was explicitly told that they hired me because my eyes didn't glaze over when the interview covered their static ip network
The thing is, that was then. Now suggesting a static ip immediately begs the question of what wouldn't you use dns to solve the problem instead.
Dns doesn't solve all cases but it does now cover a significant number. The industry has changed enough that I no longer expect anyone who doesn't have some background with networking specific concerns to know this stuff
I couldn't tell you if this is a net positive, but it definitely feels less relevant to my day-to-day than being competent with whatever DSL your CI pipeline uses
dhcp. Boring, simple, and insufficient for professional work imo. Not a problem for a largely static home network
At work "the ricoh guy" manages the printers. You can access them by name (wins) or ip. I think that's a good enough solution, but it focuses all the static ip work to one small team (possibly 1 person) and to everyone else it's some characters you effectively copy paste once per laptop refresh. No networking knowledge necessary
To be clear, it's not that I think these skills lack value or practical application in lots of professional settings, it's that I think their relative position to other things has gone down
A typical modern home printer is connected to WiFi and uses that to reach the cloud where most of the actual implementation for printing lives. So, yes.
My mother's (5+ year old) all-in-one colour printer etc. will cheerfully scan a page and email it to her, because of course although the sensors turning the page into image data are physically in the scanner, all the actual software she's using is "in the cloud" so sending her an email is no harder than turning it into a downloadable ("saved") PDF.
Could you explain in simple terms how knowing how to change the PCIe card in your computer without looking up instructions has had an effect on your ability to write software?
No overlap in one's profession with an abutting profession determines a lack in skill or time with it. Ex. the chef that can't sharpen a knife, or a chemist that has no knowledge of physics, or the Software Engineer that doesn't know the difference between a file's size and its size on disk.
