It's not even that the best debug stories boil down to understanding and using tcpdump, but there's a real, giant divide between people who know how to troubleshoot and those who don't. Slinging code is relatively easy if you know the language, but odds are your app talks to a database, or makes a web call, or uses memory, and knowing how you interact at that layer is the difference between good and bad experiences, and uptime or not when things fail. I'm no electrician, but I know how to check my circuit box when something in my house won't power on, and then how to swap power cables, etc.