I mean that several professors have learned that I'm useful for resolving packaging related problems and they contact me for help with them. They expect that if they had a job in industry then there would be somebody who they would file a ticket with and then that person would help sort out the tangle.

Also, in a previous job, I was responding to tickets of that kind (e.g. "why does installing this version of foo prevent the bar from running at a all?").

Others provide support in other ways. The guy racking and stacking GPUs at a data center somewhere is doing so, at least partially, in support of some specialist wielding python to move data around.

Sure plenty of specialists do their own stunts, but plenty others do not and instead have support, institutional or otherwise, for that kind of thing.

That makes some sense, except you're mostly describing a division of labor where the people relying on you to fix their environments probably could do it themselves if you weren't around.

I think we agree these are not typical end users.

> Others provide support in other ways. The guy racking and stacking GPUs at a data center somewhere is doing so, at least partially, in support of some specialist wielding python to move data around.

I mean, the farmers help to feed me, too. Where do you draw the line?

My point is that they are typical. I think there are legions of them. Whole classrooms at a time, whole departments at a time, people whose job is to write python according to whatever procedures came down from on high.

We don't notice them because they're not participating in conversations about which programming language might be suitable. Instead they're having conversations about whether Python is necessary or whether they can get away with a spreadsheet.