But your suggestion still reads fine! Let's insert it: > Today’s "less than mediocre at a lot of different things" engineers have replaced yesterday’s sysadmi

But your suggestion still reads fine! Let's insert it: > Today’s "less than mediocre at a lot of different things" engineers have replaced yesterday’s sysadmins, DBAs, and webdevs altogether. The OP's point still stands! So I don't see what you're on about :-P