At some point you draw a line, and Google/Amazon/Microsoft/etc. have very clear pictures of where their respective lines should be. It seems to work well for th

At some point you draw a line, and Google/Amazon/Microsoft/etc. have very clear pictures of where their respective lines should be. It seems to work well for them. Think about it this way. 1st principles knowledge, like algorithms, isn't at all useful 90% of the time. But 1% of the time, not knowing it will cause very out-sized penalties in efficiency or debugging costs. Now take the frequency of the occasional 1st principles usefulness penalties and multiply it by all of the developer-hours at Google/Amazon/Microsoft. That is why Google/Amazon/Microsoft do that!