I absolutely agree with your first few paragraphs. As a hobbyist before I was a professional (Linux desktop since '95), I'm surprised when I meet people who have a technical skill but not a hobbyist background. I first encountered it with Oracle DBAs who sometimes were amazing at Oracle but had rudimentary Unix skills, and that's becoming more commonplace as people do things like phone app development but without the background "we" expect (whether rightly or wrongly).

That said, my background as a Sysadmin/Ops person also landed me in my own silo. I don't have much programming experience, and running production systems means NO, the environment does NOT give you access to wide-open CPAN, RPM, pip, whatever downloads. It's a regimented release process where someone upstream has to provide the relevant dependancies and you don't just go around installing stuff, running services, etc.

As a result of my background and not being a developer, on HN I hear of new languages/frameworks/libraries/methodologies on a daily basis. Things that, clearly, a large number of readers hear must already be familiar with, even though many of them will be out of fashion in 6 months.

And then the process to install a lot of these things is "oh, just pipe a wget of this script into bash, RPM install this, pip install that, don't worry, it's all quite safe for your system..."

In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging.