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its also worth noting that evicting this common knowledge from our collective sysadmin brains doesn't just leave our brains unoccupied. Now we can worry about a new class of things. Making meat available at the grocery didn't mean suddenly our lack of hunting knowledge left a void of stupidity -- we learned new things to fill that time and energy we used to spend on common things.

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That is true as well, but as with most double-edged swords there can be a downside in that people that used to have the deep knowledge can now be swapped out with "cheaper" people that do not, and will not (by choice or by policy) do something in addition to the remaining shallow tasks.

That said, a classic entry-level "sysadmin" job was just a "jargon translation" job between a vendor and the local implementation of the vendor's products quite often anyway. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I do think it makes for a waste of human potential just to keep the anonymous cogs of an organisation running.

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