> I don't think they're in the must-know, 101-level tier of back end knowledge. Fair enough, I admit I am looking at things from behind glasses tinted in a cer

> I don't think they're in the must-know, 101-level tier of back end knowledge. Fair enough, I admit I am looking at things from behind glasses tinted in a certain way. But I do believe some kind of familiarity of the concepts is essential. Even at relatively small scale. Read contention in particular is really easy to hit the first time you have to deal with an increase in traffic (doesn't need to be external, could be a minor change that triples the number of cross-service calls). Simply because the first observation is that worker systems are running hot, the instinctive reaction is to add more workers. The two core problem areas in backend development - which in this context can mean anything that requires non-trivial server side processing - are I/O latency and processing capacity. Regardless of scale. Being unaware of (or worse, ignoring) them is not tenable.