> The number of jobs that benefit from mastery of the craft is essentially equal to the number of jobs.

I think this is true. Nobody disputes that.

Imagine you'd hire Torvalds to debug and fix why your Wordpress does not work. I truly think he'd do an excellent job figuring out that AWS has a firewall that's blocking the connection from your WP node to your MySQL node...

Somehow, the example above feels bizarre and yet these are the types of issues a lot of architects, consultants, and other highly-paid job positions deal with on a daily basis.

> I do not enjoy finding the work of a bunch of people that studied enough to get hired and no more.

This sentence makes no sense to me. I'd say you "find the work of people that studied enough to get hired and no more" possibly just slightly more often as you "find work of people who never wrote anything public until they mastered everything they could, from building computers from NAND gates up to AI/ML".

Torvalds had trouble installing Debian, IIRC. Your wordpress scenario sounds more like basic IT / sysadmin stuff, which he likely never does himself. Same deal with Stallman (he gets others to set up his computers). These guys seem ultra-specialized to the point you could argue they don't know how to use a computer that well, even if they're fine programmers.

They may benefit from it, but they won't pay more if it's not required. So if you expect more compensation for your mastery, you may get passed over for someone with less skill, but the required skill.

I was mostly trying to say that you shouldn’t stop trying to learn just because you got hired :)