The challenge is that lower level work doesn't always translate into value for businesses. For instance, knowledge of sockets is very interesting. On one hand,

The challenge is that lower level work doesn't always translate into value for businesses. For instance, knowledge of sockets is very interesting. On one hand, I spent my youth learning sockets. For me to bang out a new network protocol takes a few weeks. For others, it can take months. This manifested in my frustration when I lead building a new transport layer using just sockets. While the people working with me were smart, they had limited low level experience to debug things.