My first tech question I got asked at an interview 20 years ago was: > Is this number positive or negative? > 0101 0101 They expected me to ask about things l

My first tech question I got asked at an interview 20 years ago was: > Is this number positive or negative? > 0101 0101 They expected me to ask about things like endianness and to know the least significant bit is the only one we are about to answer that question. While bits in a byte "is" a "low level" topic. It is one of the more useful ones even for CRUD. My instinct is that "yes"... basic knowledge like this is important. After all, even as an API developer I have often had to know things like how many bytes an int is on my machine, how bitwise operators work, whether the system is little endian or big endian, etc. Also, how do you understand Unicode (something very important for i18n) if you don't know the answer to this question? But then I had to go back and second guess myself. Most of this stuff is abstracted out now. I would say it comes down to what type of data you are dealing with. If you're dealing with files in binary formats, compilers, etc. Then yes, you need that stuff. And yes, a simple CRUD app does sometimes need to deal with that stuff. But if not? I guess it's fine not to know.