I started on other peoples computers personally. I poked around and played with linux and some networking and when I went to school for it I realized that it wa

I started on other peoples computers personally. I poked around and played with linux and some networking and when I went to school for it I realized that it was too late to learn it from the ground up. If you are still trying to figure out how a driver is written in C then you aren't up to date on any current programming paradigm. While I get that 20 years ago you needed to care exactly how memory was handled to properly optimize your code, now I am writing data processing jobs that take 10-15 TB of memory spread across 30 computers. If I fuck up 1 MB of ram per computer it really doesn't matter and it is way more efficient to just add another machine rather than pay me for two months of work to fiddle it down to perfect. The scales I work at are more about Big O than anything. If I make a mistake that is N^2 vs Log N then I wait a week for a job to finish verses 1 hour. That is an issue. If I add on 10 min because I inefficiently use swap space it doesn't matter. I need to pay attention to the higher abstraction rather than the minute details. Sure I can fix a computer but if I do that rather than stopping a job from doing puts across regions it will cost the company 12000 dollars for each hour I am removing malware.