At my day job? Never happened. Interviewing? Sure. Those LeetCode algorithmic problems have a tendency to sometimes touch upon these well-established values of

At my day job? Never happened. Interviewing? Sure. Those LeetCode algorithmic problems have a tendency to sometimes touch upon these well-established values of the underlying architecture of bytes/bits and how memory pages are structured, etc. The thing is: Working with Java and Python in your classical corporate job maintaining a DB schema, creating and/or optimizing endpoints with Flask and/or Springboot, most of these underlying concepts will be shielded from you entirely. Again, in Java, you can specify the load factor for a HashMap when you create it... I bet you 99% of the developers working with Java have never needed to do it or might not even know what it is or how it works under the hood. Maybe they don't even know that internally the hashtable size is managed in powers of two... but again, I don't truly believe this matters for 99% of the work you'll be doing. It's either something that you need to use or fully understand, or something that will always be abstracted away from you. 8 or 2^8 or 2^8-1 are just numbers basically.... It's good to know a bit their intrinsic meaning or why they are relevant just as a general knowledge, but, unless you are doing C programming at a very low level, embedded systems, microcontrollers, etc, this is just knowledge that will _never_ be used.