The post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129) mentions some cases where knowledge about

The post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129) mentions some cases where knowledge about how compilers work would be useful and offers a warning about what may happen to those without this understanding: "In fact I used to ask candidates, as a standard interview question, how they'd find phone numbers in a tree of HTML files, and many of them (up to 30%) chose to write 2500-line C++ programs as their answer." Not that this necessarily describes you (since I don't even know what you work on), but I've heard it said (here, I think) that if CRUD is all you know, CRUD is all you'll ever do.