Comment by ragall

It already is like that, but not because of the cloud. Those of us who begun with computers in the era of the command line were forced to learn the internals of operating systems, and many ended up turning this hobby into a job.

Youngsters nowadays start with very polished interfaces and smartphones, so even if the cloud wasn't there it would take them a decade to learn systems design on-the-job, which means it wouldn't happen anyway for most. The cloud nowadays mostly exists because of that dearth of system internals knowledge.

While there still are around people who are able to design from scratch and operate outside a cloud, these people tend to be quite expensive and many (most?) tend to work for the cloud companies themselves or SaaS businesses, which means there's a great mismatch between demand and supply of experienced system engineers, at least for the salaries that lower tier companies are willing to pay. And this is only going to get worse. Every year, many more experienced engineers are retiring than the noobs starting on the path of systems engineering.