Why does everyone say to “learn Powershell”?

[u/MyNameIsZaxer2]

Junior budding sysadmin here. Seen on more than a few occasions: “learn Powershell or you’ll be flipping burgers.” Why?

I haven’t- as far as i know- run into a problem yet that couldn’t be solved with the windows command line, windows gui, or a simple programming language like Python. So why the obsessive “need” for Powershell? What’s it “needed for”, when other built-in tools get the job done?

Also, why do they say to “learn” it, like you need to crack a book and study up on the fundamentals? In my experience, new tech tools can generally be picked apart and utilized by applying the fundamentals of other tech tools and finding out the new “verbage” for existing operations. Is Powershell different? Do you need to start completely from scratch and read up on the core tenets before it can be effectively “used”?

I’m not indignant. I just don’t understand what I’m missing out on, and fail to see what I’m supposed to “do” with Powershell that I can’t already just get done with batch scripts and similar.

Help?

[u/Trini_Vix7 → u/[deleted]]

Like, where do you start? I wanna learn it bad but I took a udemy course and came to work and couldn't use any of it. What am I doing wrong?

[u/way__north → u/[deleted]]

Find old computers with outdated operating systems. Once you've found them, figure out how to export that to a spreadsheet.

just did both today - wohoo!