I 'grew up' on networking in the late 90's when next to nothing was encrypted on the wire. The amount of understanding I was able to develop about how protocol

I 'grew up' on networking in the late 90's when next to nothing was encrypted on the wire. The amount of understanding I was able to develop about how protocols work by just sniffing the packets was immense. I see folks coming out of school these days and while they far surpass my skills with software development they don't really have any intuition about how the protocols work at the network level, and as a result tend to flounder when things break. However, if I hadn't stowed away all of that info 20+ years ago I think I would be in largely the same position. Obviously encrypted network protocols are essential for security and privacy, but it kind of sucks for folks trying to figure out how things work.