alt Hacker News> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed. Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler (… and no, I don't work in a low level language), he understands chip fabrication end to end.
CS is not that wide, not yet. No, one cannot know every facet of the field, but one can know enough about the facets one is in contact with that they're not "here be dragons" on the map. All the way down to the hardware.
> There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed
The fact this is "a guy", and probably there are very few people in the world who would be able to execute such a thing, probably should tell you how difficult that actually is. You're actually unintentionally making parent's point stronger, as obviously the production processes used for market products is much, much more complicated than what a guy in a shed does.
> Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler
Fair enough, this is probably way more common than "person who understands the entire chip manufacturing process from beginning to end", but it's still something that less and less people know about, in a room of 100 average developers, probably few of them could realistically claim to understand all the assembly output of their compiler, if even they're familiar enough with that their language outputs assembly in the first place.
The range of skills in developers is enourmous, you have Klaus working as IT+web dev+database+admin in a tiny 2 person web shop, and on the other hand you have Anders who is a ML expert optimizing CUDA kernels, and everything in-between. That all (or even most) of them know the far end of what they currently know is wishful thinking really, Klaus doesn't need to know about what the NVCC compiler outputs, nor do Anders need to know about the specific constraints of mapping packaged products to order shipments, that's all fine.