Yes, it's a waste of time iff it does not improve your product / get you closer to achieve the goals your organization has (profitability, whatever).
If understanding every detail of your stack makes your product better, go for it! If it doesn't then learning every detail of it is not business, it's an academic exercise.
> understanding your app and stack is a waste of time
Yes. It's bikeshedding.
How far do you go? Should people create their own Linux distro? Clearly they don't "understand" their app or stack if they aren't creating the distro, right?
And don't even get me started on libraries. If you use any libraries and haven't read 100% of the code and documentation, you couldn't possibly understand your app or stack. It must be best to do all of that before launching your product, right?
Once all that is done, you should be able to launch within 5-10 years, which is only ~$2.5M in funding for a dev team of two.
> Ignore learning efficiency in the name of padding cloud provider pockets, it's the only way!
RDS has nothing to do with "learning efficiency" or understanding a stack. It's software. You remember software, don't you? It automates mundane tasks so that you don't have to do them.
Upgrades, migrations, horizontal scaling, vertical scaling, backups... RDS does all of those things. And it costs, perhaps, $15/mo. more than a VPS.
Hell, write everything in assembly, you'll never get optimal performance using higher level languages. Plus, have you actually read all of the code in the python standard library?
That is a stupid straw man and you know it. Knowing what your software stack does it not impossible, people are just lazy and want to pump out resume enhancing features.
> Knowing what your software stack does it not impossible
No. It's literally impossible.
There is no one working at a startup today who understands their entire stack, from hardware all the way up to web code. Not even the highest-paid people at Facebook could claim to know that.
Even the knowledge required to understand the Linux kernel, which almost every software developer works with today, is beyond almost all developers. And guess what? The world keeps turning. People build cutting-edge technical startups without knowing how every part of their stack works.
There are millions of person-years of work that go into even a basic web stack. It's insane to think someone can know all of it. And the whole point of the Linux philosophy is so that you don't have to know it -- you have simple building blocks where you can understand the I/O and use them to compose something much more complex.
