As someone who’s been responsible for dealing with the consequences of “programmer” output, I’d say that they definitely should not be given the benefit of the doubt. While it may be hard to believe, the average “programmer” knows nothing about IT or networking or hardware, and you’d be lucky if they know where the power button is.

Generally “programmer” type folks are only power users in the context of software, possibly even only the software they wrote or tooling they chose.