If you had to spend time / VC money learning all of this stuff before you could begin to apply it, I absolutely agree, it's a waste of time. That's not my point. My point is people (by people, I mean "someone interested in tech and is likely to pursue it as a career") can and should learn these things earlier in life such that it's trivial once they're in the workforce.
I could go from servers sitting on the ground to racked, imaged, and ready to serve traffic in a few hours, because I've spent the time learning how to do it, and have built scripts and playbooks to do so. Even if I hadn't done the latter, many others have also done so and published them, so as long as you knew what you were looking for, you could do the same.
Yeah this is what I meant as well. Though I'd also argue that on the job returning is essential too. Which should come through multiple avenues. Mentorship from seniors to junior as well as allowing for time to learn on the job. I can tell you from having been an aerospace engineer you'd be given this time. And from what I hear, in the old days you'd naturally get this time any time you hit compile.
There's a bunch of sayings from tradesmen that I think are relevant here. And it's usually said by people who take pride in their work and won't do shoddy craftsmanship
- measure twice, cut once
- there's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it twice
- if you don't have time to do it right when will you have time to do it again?
I think the advantage these guys have is that when they do a shit job it's more noticeable. Not only to the builders but anyone else. Unfortunately we work with high abstractions but high skill is the main reason we get big bucks. Unfortunately I think this makes it harder for managers to differentiate high quality from shit. So they'd rather get shit fast than quality a tad slower because all they can differentiate is time. But they don't see the how this is so costly since everything has to be done at least thrice
I could go from servers sitting on the ground to racked, imaged, and ready to serve traffic in a few hours, because I've spent the time learning how to do it, and have built scripts and playbooks to do so. Even if I hadn't done the latter, many others have also done so and published them, so as long as you knew what you were looking for, you could do the same.