Yes, probably any software developer should know the trivial fact, that a byte consists of 8 bits (nowadays) - even if the developer is not involved with bit op

Yes, probably any software developer should know the trivial fact, that a byte consists of 8 bits (nowadays) - even if the developer is not involved with bit operations. Much more important, in my eyes, and more sophisticated, is the concept of the computer "word": a professional software dev should know how many bytes go in a word, how word length corresponds with bus width, memory organisation and how types depend on word length. And in my humble opinion, Unicode encoding is such a basic concept, that every dev should understand it on a bit level.