You are literally the problem with system administration.
The attitude that you don't need to know how to program or understand the architecture of the systems that you run on is a highly privileged attitude that you are practitioner who can remain ignorant of their tools.
The good news is that kids these days are being raised on SREs and there's a billion people in India who will take your job and won't have an attitude about learning how to program. Ultimately, you are going to be a curious dinosaur. You are a unique product of the late 90s Internet bubble where the need for system administrators expanded so much faster than the available supply and anyone halfway technically minded got hired for really good salaries and put in charge of servers.
That is going to change and evolve.
And I spend 5-10 years learning all that knowledge back in the 90s and its 15 years later and I can state with confidence that there's no regrets. If anything my only regret is that I didn't learn how to really practice "software development" as opposed to "programming" even earlier. Going forwards, I expect that more an more the lines between systems and software is going to blur and MY advice to kids these days would be that they will only be able to be ignorant of software development practices at their own peril.
And I stated doing PC Tech work in the late 80s, became a Unix admin in the mid-90s, managed the configuration management system and base configuration of a site that grew to 30,000 linux servers in the 200Xs, and then after 15 years switched to being a Software Developer. I'm fully confident based on experience that you are offering absolutely terrible advice to someone who is just learning, and you are out of touch with the direction of your own field.
Your post seems to boil down to a logical conclusion that everyone better be a software developer, as if there is no value in abstracting to a layer where things aren't pieced together with compiled software. Feels rather myopic to me. There will always be work to do at every layer
The attitude that you don't need to know how to program or understand the architecture of the systems that you run on is a highly privileged attitude that you are practitioner who can remain ignorant of their tools.
The good news is that kids these days are being raised on SREs and there's a billion people in India who will take your job and won't have an attitude about learning how to program. Ultimately, you are going to be a curious dinosaur. You are a unique product of the late 90s Internet bubble where the need for system administrators expanded so much faster than the available supply and anyone halfway technically minded got hired for really good salaries and put in charge of servers.
That is going to change and evolve.
And I spend 5-10 years learning all that knowledge back in the 90s and its 15 years later and I can state with confidence that there's no regrets. If anything my only regret is that I didn't learn how to really practice "software development" as opposed to "programming" even earlier. Going forwards, I expect that more an more the lines between systems and software is going to blur and MY advice to kids these days would be that they will only be able to be ignorant of software development practices at their own peril.
And I stated doing PC Tech work in the late 80s, became a Unix admin in the mid-90s, managed the configuration management system and base configuration of a site that grew to 30,000 linux servers in the 200Xs, and then after 15 years switched to being a Software Developer. I'm fully confident based on experience that you are offering absolutely terrible advice to someone who is just learning, and you are out of touch with the direction of your own field.