I seriously doubt this question would be asked during an interview for any position that didn't involve a good deal of low-level knowledge. If you're hiring a h

I seriously doubt this question would be asked during an interview for any position that didn't involve a good deal of low-level knowledge. If you're hiring a hardware engineer or a systems engineer, why wouldn't you hire the one that understands what actually happens inside of a computer at a very basic level? The people that are questioning the validity of this question are not in the target audience. This definitely falls more towards the Electrical and Computer Engineering end of the spectrum than CS.