The only part I have issue with is when the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"” as if that’s a bad thing. I see and agree with your actual point, but a power cycle is generally step one for almost all debugging.
TBH, as an electronics engineer and computer scientist it's the first thing I do too :) I think my point in that article was that we shouldn't teach that it's the _only_ recourse, and after if it still doesn't work then just replace it.
It's still one step better than the wisdom of my Grandmother's generation:
"If it doesn't work bang it once on the top. If it still doesn't work bang it hard on the side twice. If it still doesn't work, call a man."
(The Apple III was a beneficiary https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/ )
If you're not the sysadmin and the debugging relates to a production server, stop power cycling it and causing it to fsck on the way up while I'm trying to actually fix it tho lmao. Bonus points: you're frying all the information I need to actually see what is going wrong, now I'm digging in logs and monitoring graphs hoping to catch a clue
Definitely not something that happened repeatedly this morning, haha
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...
A more funny story:
Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible for the welfare of the donkeys.
Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience, enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured. It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to the village/local-government.