When I was 14 I (poorly) administered an Active Directory environment with mail, web, and CIFS for a restaurant without understanding DNS or DHCP. Instead of setting the WRT54G's DHCP server to hand out the domain controller's static IP as the DNS server for proper name resolution I just used IP addresses and host file entries to make everything work. I also had the MX record for the domain set to the router's WAN IP and didn't have any PTR records set - the fact that e-mail delivery went as smoothly as it did is an absolute miracle in retrospect. A few years later I figured out how DNS actually worked and in my early 20s I inherited a corporate intranet where BIND was used as the nameserver for all external corporate domain zones. Moving this setup to VPSes for increased reliability taught me a _lot_ (mostly zone transfers, SOA, etc). I'm grateful for the experience but these days everything is pretty much done for you so this is a low-value activity... "IT" isn't valued the same way that "software engineering" is for better or worse.
This is why I continue to maintain that ops and SE excel at remaining distinct fields, though I certainly don’t mind overlap.
Most of my friends are software developers and/or software developers working on cloud-based stacks.
Two of those friends lead the platform engineering groups at their respective companies. One of them has a very basic understanding of networking and could figure out how to do subnetting that didn’t come out of the box, but they’d need to stop and go learn that.
That isn’t everyone by any stretch, but I see it more often than not these days.
I agree fully with the idea that younger professionals aren’t as used to the infrastructure underneath the infrastructure being as complex as the higher layers of the OSI model that they’re frequently more experienced with.
What I hope we don’t end up with is a future where all the data center people and all the network engineers (and so on) are almost exclusively employed by a small number of mega-corps. It’s important that knowledge and experience in the fundamentals of the networked world remain widely distributed and openly accessible.
Same boat at a similar age. (Ab)using AD taught me a lot about DNS, largely after the fact. Lots of “so that’s why that didn’t work…” moments later down the line.
