My answer to the question of whether should X know Y is yes if this is what you do on daily basis. If this is relevant but needed only occasionally, then just h

My answer to the question of whether should X know Y is yes if this is what you do on daily basis. If this is relevant but needed only occasionally, then just having a vague awareness of it existing and being able to find exact information when needed is enough. In my opinion, a professional is not somebody who knows absolutely everything there is to know in the field, but someone who firstly has a lot of hands-on experience and somebody who can quickly fill in the gaps in the knowledge when necessary. A "professional software dev" is a very broad category. In most of web development, you can get away just fine without knowing how many bits are in a byte. On the other hand, in Arduino you'd encounter bits and bytes on a regular basis. As for me, if somebody was to ask me this question during an interview, I would assume that it's a trick question. There were some old exotic architectures in the past such as IBM that stored data in 6bits.