The challenge is that lower level work doesn't always translate into value for businesses. For instance, knowledge of sockets is very interesting. On one hand, I spent my youth learning sockets. For me to bang out a new network protocol takes a few weeks. For others, it can take months.

This manifested in my frustration when I lead building a new transport layer using just sockets. While the people working with me were smart, they had limited low level experience to debug things.