Yes. For working, say, with physical simulations an experienced worker should know IEEE754. It does not take more than half a day of learning the standard to kn

Yes. For working, say, with physical simulations an experienced worker should know IEEE754. It does not take more than half a day of learning the standard to know how to approach the problem of the post with confidence. The real quirks lie elsewhere, in the hardware implementations and rounding rules (e.g. does FMA have the same precision of multiply-then-add? why does the order of the elements of a sum make a difference? etc.). And once you know these you can treat floating points with familiarity and expect your operations to be predictable to their last bit. If I were hiring for a developer of FDTD simulations I would expect them to be familiar with things like -0.0, subnormal numbers and NaN types and to be able to learn if necessary how to go around the murky stuff like rounding. Floats shouldn't be mysterious, they are at the end 16/32/64/80/128 bit variables with deterministic operations defined on them.