The challenge is that lower level work doesn't always translate into value for businesses. For instance, knowledge of sockets is very interesting. On one hand, I spent my youth learning sockets. For me to bang out a new network protocol takes a few weeks. For others, it can take months.

This manifested in my frustration when I lead building a new transport layer using just sockets. While the people working with me were smart, they had limited low level experience to debug things.

I understand that that stuff is all relatively niche/not necessarily useful in every day life (I know nothing about sockets or TCP/IP) - I just figured your average SWE would at least be familiar with the concepts, especially if they had formal training. Guess it just comes down to individual interests

I think you may have missed the point (as probably a lot of people did) I was trying to make. It's one thing to know what assembly is and to even be able to dabble in a bit of assembly, it's another thing to be proficient in assembly for a specific CPU/instruction set. It's orders of magnitude harder to be proficient and/or actually write tooling for it vs understanding what a MOV instruction does or to conceptually get what CPU registers are.

Professional SWE are professional in the sense that they know what needs to happen to get the job done (but I am not surprised when someone else does not get or know something that I consider "fundamental")

yes, some intermediate devs I've worked with are unable to do almost anything except write code. e.g. unable to generate an ssh key without assistance or detailed cut and paste instructions.

Shit, I google or manpage or tealdeer ssh key generation every single time....

Pretty much any command I don't run several times a month, I look up. Unless ctrl+r finds it in my history.

Maybe I should apply for some senior dev roles then :)

Many/most senior devs do not have the experience you described. But there are often a lot of meetings, reports, and managing other devs.

Yes, you absolutely should, unless you are already making a ton of money in a more fulfilling job.

It's extremely common. And many of them are fairly productive until an awkward bug shows up.