Whatever level you work at, spend some of your learning time one layer down.
If you write React, learn what the browser actually does with it. If you write application code, learn what your runtime does with memory. If you write SQL, learn roughly how the query planner decides. If you run things in Kubernetes, learn what a Linux process and a network namespace really are.
Not to become an expert down there. Just enough that the layer below you stops being magic.
Here is why this is worth your evenings more than another framework.
Most of the truly baffling bugs in your career will not live in your layer. Your code will be correct and the behaviour will still be wrong, because something underneath is doing exactly what it was designed to do and you did not know it was there. Every senior engineer you have watched debug something in twenty minutes that had you stuck for two days was not smarter. They just had a mental model one floor down.
The second reason is that the layer below moves slower. Frameworks turn over every few years. HTTP, processes, memory, filesystems and the relational model have been broadly stable for decades. Time spent there keeps paying long after the thing you learned it for has been replaced.
The third reason is confidence, which is a strange word to use about technical knowledge, but it is the real effect. Unexplained behaviour is stressful. When you can reason about what is underneath, fewer things feel like sorcery and more feel like systems that will eventually make sense if you keep looking.
Keep it modest and it will actually happen. One layer down, not three. An hour a week. Pick the thing that confused you at work this month and read until you can explain it to yourself in plain sentences.
A good prompt is simply to ask, of anything you use daily, what is it doing that I could not implement a bad version of myself.
Then go and find out.
Depth under your feet is what turns a person who uses tools into a person who understands them.
– Asael Shinder
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