I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge.
As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to the problems and logic behind all those new solutions. Understand how we come to have JavaScript and the browser mess we are in and so many other curious features of todays digital world.
I understand pretty much all of the layers of the computing from how CPUs achieve some of the things they are doing to bus protocols, to instructions, physical memory, low level OS internals, high level OS internals, virtual memory, userspace platform communication with OS, programming language runtimes and linking, shared libraries, IPC, networking, virtualization, etc.
The issue, as with any automation, is that new players on the scene (younger devs, devops, etc.) simply have no chance to learn the same things and go trough the same path.
For them, spending a decade working with a low level programming language before you jump into high level programming language is simply not an option.
We, people who really understand the technology that the world runs on, are a slowly dying breed. We are still here as tech leads, managers, directors, business owners. But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals.
It reminds me of:
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
and how many of today’s CS-degree holders would barely understand any of it. As someone who has also “grown up with all the technology”, I’ve learned and experienced all that. But as a percentage of “software engineers”, there’s fewer and fewer that do every day.