At Google & Co. you might need this stuff, but 99.9% of the other engineers at Google & Co. don't. Source: me, as I work at "& Co.", who employs numerous ex-Goo

At Google & Co. you might need this stuff, but 99.9% of the other engineers at Google & Co. don't. Source: me, as I work at "& Co.", who employs numerous ex-Google staff, and have friends in other "& Co."s, etc. What Google & Co.'s engineers do is gatekeep. Sometimes it's out of ignorance, sometimes out of inappropriate generalization of their roles to others, and sometimes out of a deep angst caused by working in roles that effectively make almost all their CS-specific trivia next to useless in practice.