While I tend to agree (my personal bugbear is understanding what the abstractions are hiding, e.g. containers are cgroups), as others have pointed out to me, there’s always another abstraction to peel away. Until you go back to Shockley, someone can always laugh at your moral high ground. EDIT: The irony of citing Shockley and using the phrase “moral
high ground” isn’t lost on me, but hopefully for this particular point his physics work can be disconnected from his other beliefs.
That said, while I do believe that there’s a practical limit to how much depth of knowledge is required for most jobs, it’s perilously close to what is helpful to know. For example, while you don’t need to know how a B+tree works to write data into a database, knowing that the DB uses that (and in what capacity) can be enormously helpful when determining how to structure your table schema. Or at a higher level, you don’t need to know SQL to use an ORM, but it makes spotting performance problems much easier if you do.
That said, while I do believe that there’s a practical limit to how much depth of knowledge is required for most jobs, it’s perilously close to what is helpful to know. For example, while you don’t need to know how a B+tree works to write data into a database, knowing that the DB uses that (and in what capacity) can be enormously helpful when determining how to structure your table schema. Or at a higher level, you don’t need to know SQL to use an ORM, but it makes spotting performance problems much easier if you do.