I’ve interviewed DevOps candidates who couldn’t rename 30 files at once. They had AWS certifications. They had Kubernetes experience. They had years on their resume. But when I asked them to automate a simple task without Google, they froze. ​ Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: Many "DevOps engineers" today are just professional button clickers. They know where the buttons are in the AWS console. They can copy-paste commands from Stack Overflow. But they don't know how to use Bash properly. They are not able to write shell scripts. ​ This single weakness is keeping them stuck at $80K while others make $200K doing the same job title. ​ You Are Using Your Computer Wrong Think about how you interact with your computer right now. You point. You click. You drag. You drop. You repeat the same 47-step process every time you need to do something. Computers were invented to free humans from repetitive labor. Instead, we’ve turned them into elaborate pointing-and-clicking machines. Every time you click something, you’re doing a computer’s job for it. Every time you manually repeat a task, you’re trading your time for laziness. Every time you can’t automate something, you reveal a fundamental gap in your skill set. And hiring managers see it immediately. ​ The Power That Cannot Be Faked When I was a Junior DevOps Engineer, I watched a senior solve in 10 seconds what took me 2 hours. He didn’t install a special tool. He didn’t use a fancy GUI application. He typed a single line of bash. My jaw dropped. I asked him immediately if he could teach me. That moment changed my career. ​ The command line provides capabilities that no graphical interface can match. Rename 500 files based on patterns? One line. Find every log file containing a specific error across 20 servers? One line. Transform data, filter it, and pipe it to another tool? One line. Automate a deployment that takes 45 minutes by hand? One script. This kind of power cannot be replicated in a GUI. Ever. Once you experience it, you can never go back to clicking.