> 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.
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.