I feel like if you walk into a job interview knowing the corner-cases of a two-phase commit and being able to solve a problem using Lamport timestamps, you're probably in the top 90th percentile of dev applicants.
Maybe ~99th.
The author has been developing software for 20 years. He is likely a fine applicant for a significant number of software dev positions, since he can learn and apply many different technologies very quickly, from what he has said. And also, from what he has said... he doesn't come close to what you described.
I've been developing software professionally for five years. I've been programming C/C++ for 10. (I'm 23; my passion has been for gamedev.) And I don't come close to what you described.
If I devoted myself to learning what you just described, I could probably achieve a thorough understanding (deep knowledge, an important distinction from superficial knowledge) inside a month. But at the end of that, it seems doubtful I'd be much closer to accomplishing the author's stated goal... I would only know two essentially random cornercases.
All of that said, thank you (and SpikeGronim) for mentioning Lamport timestamps; time to go a-wikipedia'n.
If you want more Lamport goodies: "Paxos Made Simple" (distributed transactions done right): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69....
"The Byzantine Generals Problem" (harshest failure model known and how to cope with it): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
An interview where he talks about his approach to systems, particularly formal reasoning and specification: http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-lesl...
His publication list - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
It won't take you a month to learn these things, but with commit protocols in particular, you have to implement and test them to really grok them.