Technical procedures and trends

I have worked in electronics and telecommunications for 17 years now. I've seen many equipment types pass by and whole skill sets become obsolete. But the newest trends in electronics and communication technology tend to bother me. Few of the newer technicians and even some of the engineers have no real idea of how the systems they work on actually operate.

Transportation cost for goods has dropped so low, the new procedures have been to pull any suspect units of equipment and return them to the manufacturer. This leads to people just focusing on the box itself. There is often times no awareness of how the boxes interconnect to form a complete system. For more obvious failures when an entire unit goes bad simple pull and replace is a fine procedure to use, but when problems are more systemic or subtle a person has to understand WHY each of the units operates and the parameters under which the system changes. Far to many technicians these days just learn to pull and replace each unit till something works, all the time just burning through their spare parts with no understanding. It's a bad work habit which is becoming the industrial standard.