I build High Availability Platforms so Cloud is not for me

And a cheap way to build out the technical, marketing, and billing architecture for that is to partner with AWS, which has built all that already.

Things get fuzzier in software development. Programmers are supposed to be users of everything they aren't programming. Things are supposed to be black boxes with fully isolated layers of abstraction. Ha. Doesn't work. To be competent, you must be aware of, at a minimum, what pieces are under you, at an intermedium, how they work, and at a maximum, how to create them yourself.

I'm only talking about people who want to be great technical workers though. If you just want to make a MVP to get funding then hire dweebs, who wasted their life learning computers, to make you rich, feel free to do that instead.

There is shame in not understanding how that high-level language actually works, because it means you'll invariably be a worse programmer than the guy that does understand what he's actually doing.

If you want to drive a race car, you don't have to be a mechanic. You do have to understand some basic physics and simple parts of the car. For example, when you turn sharply into a corner, the wheel's camber helps determine how much of the tire's surface stays on the road, giving you more grip, keeping you in the corner at a higher G-force. Looking at the wear on the tire you can tell that your camber might need to be adjusted, and that might make 1/10th of a second difference, which is the difference between winning and losing.

If you want to program like a grandmother driving to the grocery store, all you need is gas. But if you want to program like a race car driver, try to learn how the internals work.

I'd also add that if you want to program for people like Google or Amazon, you need to understand how the internals work, or you will be seriously embarrassed at the interview. (From personal experience)

Agreed. That isn't the same as the "don't want to know how the system works" mentality. High level languages are great tools for "encoding and automating processes you understand so you Don't Repeat Yourself, or perhaps Don't Need To Do It The First Time". They are great for "making all the initial decisions for you so you can get started and come back to those later".

They are horrid tools for "allowing you to be ignorant".

Now, I don't think everyone should know everything about computer systems (heck, just asking someone to know everything about C++ is a tall order ;-), and I certainly don't think you should have memorized all the configuration logic for hardware and software. However, if you are a technology professional, you really should see a key part of your professional value as your understanding of as much of how the system functions as possible. The understanding will never be total; it will never be complete; it ought to be an area of concern.

If it isn't, you aren't an technology professional. You might be an entrepreneur. You might even be a great product designer. You aren't an engineer.

That might sound like it is about semantics. It isn't. Computer systems are basically towers of babel where each brick is another leaky abstraction. Engineers are the people who build, maintain, and replace that tower. You can't do the job well if you only know about the roof.

Entrepreneurs have such a huge challenge just searching for a viable business model, that they tend to see all other problems as irrelevant. While the problems are usually smaller, possibly even trivial by comparison, they aren't irrelevant. If you are a tech company, doing technology right is more than just a tiny bit relevant.

Think of it this way: SQL provides a tremendously high level of abstraction to data systems. This makes it terribly efficient for quickly coming up with queries you want answers for. However, if something ever goes wrong, or if you are writing application code that is going to be run over and over again, you want someone who understands a lot more about the system than just how to translate a question in to SQL. That goes double if somehow the query is vital to your business' ongoing operations.