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Depends on what you mean by computer engineering but they should definitely have a good mental model of how computers work. Otherwise your complex applications
by vlovich123 3y ago
Depends on what you mean by computer engineering but they should definitely have a good mental model of how computers work. Otherwise your complex applications will have trouble scaling. That can matter less in many cases but early architecture mistakes can easily put you down an evolutionary dead end forcing you to experience exponentially rising maintenance costs to add new features / fix bugs or rewrite the thing by someone who understands computer architecture better (+ take advantage of a better understanding the problem domain)
- WJW 3y agoI see what you mean but there's a huge gap between a "good enough" mental model of how computers work and the actual in-depth details that GP means and that have been successfully abstracted away from us. For example: the amount of cases when I have needed to know about the details of how the transistors in RAM chips are laid out have been extremely minimal. Nor have I ever had to worry about the encoding scheme used by the transceivers for the optical fibers that my TCP packets move across. Obviously there jobs out there that do have to worry about these things (mostly at companies like TSMC and Cisco), but in practice I doubt regular engineers at even the largest scale software companies have to worry about stuff like that.