While high-level languages and nice operating systems are a good thing, they often mask what's beyond them. If someone grows up in a world they can't look beyond the curtain, bad things happen.

Many times I have witnessed sysadmins banging their heads trying to tune parameters on a Linux server that ran under a virtual machine setting and wondering why some counters were off, without realizing the machine underneath their OS didn't really have hardware counters they could, forgive me, count on.