>I've met plenty of engineers who couldn't tell you how any of those things work at a low level, but still manage to maintain high-paying jobs. I've also had pl

>I've met plenty of engineers who couldn't tell you how any of those things work at a low level, but still manage to maintain high-paying jobs. I've also had plenty of interviews where these topics never got brought up. Maybe that says more about hiring practices than anything else, but I think you're vastly overestimating the worth of that knowledge to most companies and individuals. The question is also simply what you pay for and what is in a job description. To simplify, you have to pay a lot less for someone treating software solutions as blackboxes with known behavior then someone who understands what is done. You can of course ask in an job interview about everything from compiler optimization to network intrusion detection to image processing, but you better should make sure that is actually what you need.