i started out with troubleshooting which gave me a pretty good grounding in what an app should not do, and i learned about how these things happened. a lot of devs are very tunnel vision, they barely know anything outside of their field. being a polymath is quite important to being a good programmer, i think - since the job is about creating models that process information. without any practical experience at real world stuff you are not gonna be so great at modeling real world stuff.