> but there is some sort of global system understanding that you get from college (in my case computer+software+network engineering) where you can quickly narro

> but there is some sort of global system understanding that you get from college (in my case computer+software+network engineering) where you can quickly narrow down potential sources of a problem, all the way down to say, the TCP/IP stack, CPU architecture, memory management, how some code might be optimized incorrectly by the compiler. That's one potential place to get that kind of understanding. It's not the only one though. I've been fascinated by computers since I was a kid and I've put together a pretty good understanding of this stack. Don't get me wrong, college isn't a bad place to get that understanding, I'm going back myself (mostly because my employer is paying for it), but it's definitely not the only place.