Especially today some people think "great programmers" are the ones who knows all the "fashionable" tools and frameworks, wants to abstract everything (god help him if he install vim in his test environment without a fab file that configures chef) and maybe worships Uncle Bob
Knowing how to use Redis is cool, do you know what's even cooler? Being able to write it (or at least knowing how it works more or less)
Even better is getting a programmer that knows enough about making X to not attempt to implement it.
Anyway the programming is such a multi-dimensional evaluation problem that you're just as wrong as you are right.
Think about it - there are so many things programmer SHOULD KNOW it isn't possible to know them all. Let's name them some of them - good architecture style, good API writing skills, good code writing style, good documentation style, company's internal workflow with all its nuances, compiler standards, compiler optimization, non-standard compiler behavior, version control system API, version control innards, database system, file system, low level operating system implementation, kernel innards, non-standard OS behavior, hardware knowledge, driver knowledge, non-standard hardware behavior, hardware compatibility, software-hardware compatibility, etc. (This doesn't cover assembler knowledge, binary represntation of important formats).
You simply have to choose to not learn everything about certain system to be good at other things.
I'll rather pay an artist to paint me a nice piece using store bought paint than making his/her own paint.
That's fine if you just need a nice picture to hang on your wall, but probably won't work if you want a genre defining piece that that redefines how artists think about the color blue.
Especially today some people think "great programmers" are the ones who knows all the "fashionable" tools and frameworks, wants to abstract everything (god help him if he install vim in his test environment without a fab file that configures chef) and maybe worships Uncle Bob
Knowing how to use Redis is cool, do you know what's even cooler? Being able to write it (or at least knowing how it works more or less)