No, most people are stuffing everything into the application layer, or worse, a web/mobile app these days and don't know how to fix anything below it. I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch nor build their own PC or server from parts.
Also, during the 90's everything was easy to find and access. Piracy was the norm and FOSS was booming.
The field exploded though, both in terms of complexity and of number of people involved. I know many engineers that can do from compiler optimizations to web apps. I also know "programmers" that don't want to learn a new library because it stresses them.
Lots of tech we currently rely on is built under FOSS model (thinking web stuff, mobile stuff, os stuff, data center stuff). Of course you must choose to use it, but I find nowadays using Linux daily on desktop as easy as using Windows or MacOS. 20 years ago you had to fight drivers, file formats, browser issues, media formats, lack of software (I mean we run many Windows video-games on Linux without issues, how cool is that?!)
I did not check piracy lately because I find FOSS alternatives (or I can afford to buy some stuff).
> I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch
This is a very weird baseline to use for qualifying a programmer. Firewall configuration is completely irrelevant for most programmers and has been for decades. It is objectively not a programming task, it's just something that might get foisted upon a programmer if there is nobody else to do it.
Not op but how I understood it is that until recently the majority of programmers were geeks and liked to tinker and understand the systems they were writing and deploying code on.
Not sure that this is the case now, nonetheless it can be a good thing that people are specializing and concerned just on the frameworks or design patterns.
