Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386.

I make no claims that I fully understand anything, but I do have a decent understanding of how a CPU works from the level of doped silicon and up. Crucially, I read every doc I could find at every one of those jobs. You can learn enough to do the job, or you can learn more. That is a choice that everyone makes.

More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

> More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

My expertise is only in sleeping until 11am on weekends, but I too started in "tech" after being a lifelong hobbyist and have been continually shocked at how concepts like "pass by reference" are alien to a seemingly large portion of the people that I've worked with.

People often fail to know things that are basically "table stakes" in the domains they ostensibly work in, to say nothing of even being aware of something like L1 cache or how code they write could interact with it.

AWS: “We’ve separated compute and storage by a large physical distance, which makes relational databases better.”

People who knew better: wild laughter.

It’s actually kinda terrifying the more you find out how incompetent most of the people writing most of the software most of the world runs on are

Much like how the more you know about how computers work, the more mind-boggling it is that they work. The Internet? Magic. CDMA? Wizardry. EUV? Sorcery.

Could you elaborate?