> But when it comes to computers, often you need deep understanding of its inner workings to make sense of your observations of problems.
They're supposed to have that knowledge, or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge.
There's only one way to build an intuition of what kind of problem probably causes some error (most famously, if the error is completely incomprehensible, you missed a closing thingy on the previous line), and that's by doing the work a lot.
Very very true. When something causes a 1 point story to take three days; bring on the hacks and compromises and ignore anything that doesn't need dealt with to get it out the door.
I don't think so. We can do so many amazing things with the computers precisely because we don't have to know how things work. Computers are so many levels of abstractions over printed metal on melted sand.
People who know what they are doing will understand the errors of their own creations and will learn the workings of the tools they use to some degrees and will be able to understand the failing modes of these tools with experience over time. No one starts with complete knowledge before start building things.
> or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge.
Of course they should have the drive but people's first instinct would be to make the error go away so that they can do their actual work. People have limited time and energy, you can't expect a JS developer, for example, to study inner workings of a Linux box to understand all errors. It's cool when they do and gives them superpowers but it also makes them less productive as JS developers. Sometimes you simply need to implement that button to render on the server without studying the server.
They're supposed to have that knowledge, or at least not be afraid to dive in and get that knowledge.
There's only one way to build an intuition of what kind of problem probably causes some error (most famously, if the error is completely incomprehensible, you missed a closing thingy on the previous line), and that's by doing the work a lot.