Counterpoint. Before I retrained in finance I was a carpenter & joiner, and a good one too. People would wait for months for my gang to be free. Nail guns were rare in my country back then. There are only so many tools you could carry to site so you had to compromise. I had to hammer in 4" nails, so carried a 20oz Stanley claw hammer. Then it would rain so we would move to finish work...all with the same hammer. It was rare that I would leave 'half-moons' as we called them, where you hit the wood rather than the nail. None of our gang carried a second hammer. A 60 year old life long carpenter I worked with told me when I was an apprentice that 'pin hammers' with their small heads tend to leave more marks. I never saw him leave a mark with his 16oz Stanley Steelmaster. I saw him drive in 6 inch nails better than me, and saw him drive panel pins. I saw him have to give up his hammer when the rubber grip wore completely through under his thumb. I saw him try every (superficially identical factory made) hammer in the shop until he felt one was near enough. I tried it too and I could feel the difference between them. Such was the bond we had with our tools.
You see being an expert with your tools is more important than having every tool in the catalogue. In fact, knowing that one hammer intimately, having your thumb print worn into the grip, was much better than having a multitude of hammers that I had no feel for.
I would rather my team were great at Excel, knew its foibles and limitations, than to start dabbling at things they could never become properly familiar with. I don't need people who suck at SQL writing queries. I don't need people who are great at SQL but don't understand accounts either. I have been burnt by both. IT people who decide you don't need x, and filter it out are a menace to my profession.
That's no fair, you're using your tool as an instrument ;)
As I would say in instrument theory.
This can be tough for some logicians to handle when they say "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" when it's literally true on the surface.
It's just that most people don't even get basic tool use, much less move beyond, and it's quite understandable why.
You see being an expert with your tools is more important than having every tool in the catalogue. In fact, knowing that one hammer intimately, having your thumb print worn into the grip, was much better than having a multitude of hammers that I had no feel for.
I would rather my team were great at Excel, knew its foibles and limitations, than to start dabbling at things they could never become properly familiar with. I don't need people who suck at SQL writing queries. I don't need people who are great at SQL but don't understand accounts either. I have been burnt by both. IT people who decide you don't need x, and filter it out are a menace to my profession.