To an extent, this is one of the goals, to free up engineers to work on higher level things. Whether it meets that goal in some cases is debatable, and it’s certainly not ideal for us engineers who like to get to the bottom of things.
“working on higher level things” currently implies that depending on many layers of opaque and unreliable lower level hardware and software abstractions is a good idea. I think it is a mistake.
The best conclusion I can come to is "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". Depends on the context. I've seen cases where it works great and other times where it's a huge hassle.
Funny, I feel the exact opposite way. The low level stuff is where all the magic happens, where performance improvements can scale by orders of magnitude rather than linearly with a CTO’s budget. I’d much rather figure out how to condense some over-engineered distributed solution down to one machine with resources to spare.
