I don't come from a CS background but rather my education was in computer engineering, mostly of the hardware and low-level systems programming variety. The maj

I don't come from a CS background but rather my education was in computer engineering, mostly of the hardware and low-level systems programming variety. The majority of what I actually do for work is entirely self-taught. I find that having a background in the lower-level aspects of computing does help a lot. The situation where I've seen people who know mostly software falter is when debugging problems that involve system interactions. My belief is that being able to construct a mental model of what's happening from top to bottom is crucial in solving some problems and people who can't do it eventually resort to just trying random things until something works. I guess the take-away from this conversation is that it's useful to have knowledge in another related domain, be it computer hardware, low-level programming, physics, computer science, etc., even when you are developing only high-level applications.