Sure, of course there are jobs where this matter. At my previous job, I worked with a lot of embedded applications and our devs messed around a lot in the kernel. Those guys need to know this. I on the other hand was writing javascript video players. I did not, although I had to know a heck of a lot about video and audio codecs, javascript internals, etc.
Software development is a huge field. Someone designing a REST server in Java that'll run in the cloud really isn't going to need to know any of this stuff, and if he's been doing it the last 10 years, he'll be rusty on it.
It's just like how every lazy interviewer (I speak from experience, having been one) asks candidates to do binary tree traversals even when the candidates are applying for a job where the vast majority of what they'll need to do is actually string manipulation. If the candidate was a genius at regexes (which are really hard!), they never find out because they're just hung up on whether the candidate can whiteboard an algorithm he hasn't used since college.
And the real kicker in hiring philosophies like this is leads to engineering cultures where developers look at phone screens and interviews as ways to prove to the candidate how smart they are, rather than ways to drill into the behavioral candidates that your company should care about. I'll take "attention to detail" over "knows heapsort backwards and forewords" as a characteristic every day.
Technical Lead and Full Stack developer (despite being mostly back-end player) with 15 years of experience as a software builder. I worked with .NET and open source. Seek relocation.
Sure, of course there are jobs where this matter. At my previous job, I worked with a lot of embedded applications and our devs messed around a lot in the kernel. Those guys need to know this. I on the other hand was writing javascript video players. I did not, although I had to know a heck of a lot about video and audio codecs, javascript internals, etc.
Software development is a huge field. Someone designing a REST server in Java that'll run in the cloud really isn't going to need to know any of this stuff, and if he's been doing it the last 10 years, he'll be rusty on it.
It's just like how every lazy interviewer (I speak from experience, having been one) asks candidates to do binary tree traversals even when the candidates are applying for a job where the vast majority of what they'll need to do is actually string manipulation. If the candidate was a genius at regexes (which are really hard!), they never find out because they're just hung up on whether the candidate can whiteboard an algorithm he hasn't used since college.
And the real kicker in hiring philosophies like this is leads to engineering cultures where developers look at phone screens and interviews as ways to prove to the candidate how smart they are, rather than ways to drill into the behavioral candidates that your company should care about. I'll take "attention to detail" over "knows heapsort backwards and forewords" as a characteristic every day.
Excellent! We are on the same page.