[lamontcg]

> Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from.

Yeah, but at some point you need a plumber who at least has a passing understanding of where it comes from, and more importantly knows how to fix any problems you may have with your plumbing and its connection to municipal water/sewer.

And there needs to be someone employed somewhere who understands the whole municipal water supply and sewer system and how it is engineered and all the problems that it has.

Also, it is good to have the intellectual curiosity so that you could at least take a stab at it off the top of your head, and you wouldn't be averse to learning about it, if it suddenly became relevant to your life.

And there is a difference between the person who will hit a high priority "bug" in their life and will grind on it until they get it fixed, learning whatever they need to in the process, and people who just get stuck and try to avoid the problem.

As an example from work, I've been dumped into an open source codebase that I had zero familiarity with (keepalived) and found a missing ntohl() bug that affected Solaris/sparc servers (explaining quite nicely why it didn't affect Linux once the bug got found). And I did this when we were shipping keepalived in our product, fixing it under an extreme time crunch, and rescued a large contract with a Bank. This wasn't even a product that I was actively working on as a developer anymore either, but the devs on the product weren't familiar enough with C hacking.

I get the feeling that "kids these days" would just say "I dunno, Solaris is just cursed".

And that is an out of date, overly specific technological problem, but you can probably update that with any of the popular blog posts on this site where someone digs into some highly specific problem to find some incredibly detailed problem resolution. There's still people doing that. The stories are fairly popular. But it is weird to see so much "I don't need to know, and I don't need to care" sentiments on "Hacker" News in response to the (admittedly AI generated) title article.

[xyzzy123]

My point was meant to be a bit more subtle; that we all engage with abstractions of reality. Whenever I'm tempted to complain about people not knowing stuff, I pause and think about how little I really know.

In my grandfather's peer group, you were lacking essential knowledge if you couldn't rebuild an engine.

[lamontcg]

Interestingly, I've got a truck with a dead engine that I'm considering if I should yank it out and replace/rebuild it... Never done that before and don't know how to do it...