I’m personally of the opinion that everyone who works in software should have to rack a server and bootstrap it. Physically mount it, cable it, and get the *nix distribution of your choice running on it, serving Hello, World.

Everywhere I’ve worked, there is a marked difference in the quality of engineers who had played with hardware - even those who merely had expressed interest in it, and maybe had an RPi - and those who had not. There is something about physically touching the thing that runs your code that makes you better at it. Maybe it’s a correlation between “wants to play with something unnecessary but adjacent” and “curious enough to ask why more frequently,” but I swear, it exists.