Agreed coming from the ops world also.

I've had a frustrating experience the past few years trying to hire junior sysadmins because of a real lack of problem solving skills once something went wrong outside of various playbooks they memorized to follow.

I don't need someone who can follow a pre-written playbook, I have ansible for that. I need someone that understands theory, regardless of specific implementations, and can problem solve effectively so they can handle unpredictable or novel issues.

To put another way, I can teach a junior the specifics of bind9 named.conf, or the specifics of our own infrastructure, but I shouldn't be expected to teach them what DNS in general is and how it works.

But the candidates we get are the opposite - they know specific tools, but lack more generalized theory and problem solving skills.