No not all of them. I think there can be a tenancy to think the way that one learnt to program gives the best grounding: this is a bias. For my money there are

No not all of them. I think there can be a tenancy to think the way that one learnt to program gives the best grounding: this is a bias. For my money there are different types of programmer and depending on what sort of project you are doing you might want different mixed. That can mean knowing both your strengths and weaknesses and those of your colleagues. By far the best attributes of programmers are the want to constantly improve their code and experience. However sometimes a wealth of experience can lock a programmer into a fixed way of thinking. I know quite a number of C++ programmers who seemingly don't seem to get OO for instance. Others may not approach a problem in the best way. You journey seems to imply should new programmers follow your path to get an understanding of machines. A lot of this technology is not relevant. Multicore systems are fairly modern, and hacking java bytecode is probably just as good preparation as hacking a Tandy. In face many of those old microcomputers were much simpler that even some VM architectures. It sounds like you may have been hired into a team precisely because of this sort of experience you have. However not every optimization these days is a low level optimization. I note the YouTube architecture and how much of the service was/is written in a scripting language. It wouldn't take long to find an opensource project that you could easily make use of these skills. Far from being a dinosaur there are whole industries that still use this sort of knowledge: but perhaps not on the desktop.