> Do you know how x86 registers work? Or atomic instructions available on ARM, SPARC, or POWER architectures?

Yeah, I have a pretty good idea of how we go from code -> IR registers -> x86 registers and how the underlying hardware has more registers than that, etc.

As for SPARC and POWER, I have not yet gotten my hands on one! But as someone who writes compilers for fun I did learn about most of that, yes.

I write C# in my dayjob, and having written high-ish performance C++ and Rust for a couple years before that, and because of all the curiosity-driven projects I've done (like writing useless compilers), I did learn a lot.

This has helped me massively in my job, especially when optimizing our C# sensor data ingestion backend to process hundreds of thousands of measurements per seconds with explicit backpressure etc. it was great fun because I know what I'm doing.

I'm not trying to "uhm actually" you, but when you call yourself a software engineer, I do expect that you know some of these things after some years in the industry. The only way you wouldn't is a lack of curiosity, or because you genuinely had no idea that you CAN learn these things.

Yes, I do. And it wouldn't take you that long to learn, either.

But maybe there's a limit to the usefulness of this abstraction. Perhaps forgetting too many basic skills lower down isn't always as useful as going from Assembly to C. I'd argue that there's a law of diminishing returns there, and it's not an endless series of benefits.

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