It was much easier to understand everything about a system. I remember working at an e-commerce system in the late 90s. I knew how Apache worked, I knew which

It was much easier to understand everything about a system. I remember working at an e-commerce system in the late 90s. I knew how Apache worked, I knew which modules I had compiled in, I knew how our proprietary code worked, I knew how Linux worked. Maybe to a lesser extent I knew our our Oracle DB worked in a deep sense, but I knew enough about RMDBs, our PL/SQL, query plans, indexes etc, such that it was sufficient. Whenever we had an issue, there wasn't part of the system I wasn't deeply familiar with, and I could just in wherever. I don't even know if that's possible today.