I’m not sure how well that analogy holds up. Farmers are usually pretty well versed in mechanical systems. To the point that now that John Deere has been screwing them over on right to repair that some farmers are even becoming versed in computer programming so they can flash the firmware on their tractors.

No, not really. Programming requires understanding of the underlying hardware, at least to a certain extent. Otherwise performance issues will look like dark magic and optimizing anything would be impossible.

Where do you start debugging if something goes wrong with the software and your information level is this low/ do you look at network stats? CPU utilization, paging/swapping? Is the hard disk bandwidth the bottleneck? Without at least some passable understanding of a computer architecture people like this just throw up their hands, or throw whatever tricks they know at the wall and see what sticks.

Horseshit. Computers aren't tools for a software engineer. Computers are tools to an administrator, an accountant. Computers are the sandbox you are building castles in as a software engineer. If you don't understand the system upon which you build, its abilities and features, its limitations, it's dependencies, you are going to make some stupid mistakes.

You need to understand discrete mathematics as a consequence of computer computation. You need to understand parallel processing and threading for muli-core processors. You need to understand networking, package management, security vulnerabilities, etc. from different architectures and protocols. And it ALWAYS helps to understand the very basics of a computer's functioning, from hardware, CPU architecture, machine code, assembly/low level programming, memory management, etc.

print('Hello, World!) is day one shit for a reason. Programming language and logic is the basics. The real expertise comes from your 3rd and 4th year materials. Databases, architecture, theory of computation, discrete mathematics, networking, operating systems, compilers, etc.

What the fuck

How is he going to fix his tractor? Wait days for John Deere to send somebody? Let the crop rot on the vine?

A lot of farmers are learning how they work cause the companies that sell them the equipment keep fucking them over. I would argue that farmers nowadays needs to know how that works along with basic programming to get past the anti-consumer bullshit companies put in to make it nigh impossible to fix things yourself.

It is good for the programmer to know how the computer operates, as well.

You've never met a farmer in your life.

Just keep trying to justify your own lack of competency I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CS departments were doing poorly, but now they're putting out farmers? No wonder all these new graduates can't find a job.

the only reason farmers are afloat financially is BECAUSE they can rebuild an engine if needed.

Just look at the john deere right to repair shit. It's literally a huge problem.