I agree with you. I would add that in addition to having that low-level understanding, they should also care about what their code does and how it performs. T

I agree with you. I would add that in addition to having that low-level understanding, they should also care about what their code does and how it performs. That's where it tends to break down for me. For a lot of people in McProgramming jobs, they don't care, and rely on Moore's law to handle the rest, or mark it off as technical debt that can be paid off at some unknown time in the future (and that time never seems to arrive).