Why would someone need to learn about load balancers in high school or earlier?

Also, don't mistake her teaching approach as indicating the people in the room weren't aware of what load balancers are or how they work. It's a good teaching technique to start out with some basic ground-work leading in to the point you wish to make. Starting out as she does ensures that everyone in the group knows _exactly_ what she's talking about before she gets to the key point, _and_ should be able to immediately understand what is going on and why.

Regardless of that, there's a lot of subtleties of dealing with load balancers that people rarely think of until they've been bitten by them. I've used load balancers quite regularly when interviewing candidates because I can almost always find some aspect of land balancers and load balancer behaviour that people aren't aware of. That gives me an ideal chance to explore a subject with a candidate and find out how quickly they can piece things together and learn.

What kind of college teaches about load balancers?

If they’re not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?

Several of the top CS programs specifically do not teach details like configuring a load balancer as with a proper background in computer science it is assumed that you can figure out the latest programming languages and the install instructions for popular software packages. It would thus be a waste of a very expensive degree as you could learn about configuring LAMP and a load balancer at a trade school instead of a theoretical research university.

No one hires MIT grads because they graduate with more extensive load balancer knowledge.

That is what you get the technicians to do

My university taught me the most basic principles of building scalable systems. It didn't teach me about setting up load balancers.

What it did teach me: locks, semaphores, mutual exclusion, the memory hierarchy, threading... the core concepts of concurrent and distributed systems that are independent of the specifics of running a large-scale web application.

In the mid-1990s, a respectable CS program would certainly have all of its graduates familiar with TCP/IP. They would know a little about routing and have built a few toy programs that implemented socket-based communication. Hot topics included "firewalls" and the race to build a gigabit-speed router. (But packet filtering at gigabit speed was quite a ways off in the future.)

The point of a technology degree had better be to teach you how to learn about new technology and experiment with it, or else a 2014 degree will be worthless in 2034.

The S in CS is science. Load balancers have nothing to do with the science of computation. It’s just like no self-respecting university will teach PowerPoint or “fixing Windows” in their CS curriculum.

In the 90s my uncle was disgusted with me because I couldn’t fix his TV — didn’t I have an EE degree?

Rightly or wrongly, universities are not vocational colleges. They exist to teach the theoretical principles of a field, not the practical skills of a particular job.

> If they’re not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?

Some degrees in CS are really vocational certificates, while more traditional degrees are not.

Where else might they learn about load balancers? I doubt there are many high schools teaching these concepts.

Vendors like Cisco have excellent training, but it's biased towards their own gear.