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Comment by mjbeswick | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely they should, as without knowing what a byte is there is little chance someone would know how data is represented in computer systems.

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This may be an outdated opinion based on the people I'm seeing leave bootcamps. I think that underlying architecture is so heavily abstracted these days that you do not need to really know _how_ a computer works in order to make something functional.

You can definitely make something functional without knowing how it works. But it will only work until it doesn't, then you won't be able to debug it. Coding javascript for example is removed enough from the internal working of the processor that a lot of details don't matter. But should you need to send a binary data packet somewhere through a websocket...

Don't get me wrong, I agree. I just see a lot of people bypass the basics.

I think that this kind of thing will become too low level for most developers and it'll become speciality knowledge. I'd say that most developers I've met have been content to sit and plug one package into another, without too much care about how they work.

Once you encounter the problem of sending binary data somewhere, presumably you will look up how to do that and find out all you need to know about bits and bytes.

Things can break in ways that are harder to fix if you don't have any idea approximately how many bytes things should be

I'm not arguing for the lack of knowledge, just explaining my experience with a wave of developers that I've encountered.

Just to confirm: I believe people should know how computers work from an architectural stand point.

Thanks to the Law of Leaky Abstractions, chances are they'll need to know anyway.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

> based on the people I'm seeing leave bootcamps

Someone who has only attended a bootcamp cannot really be considered a 'professional software dev'...

These are people who have gotten jobs and are being paid for it. I only encountered the ones good enough to have passed interviews at companies.

I'm sure that people can get paid to code simple, well defined stuff in a very high-level language/script without formal training but "professional software dev" implies a level of knowledge and competency that is far beyond knowing how many bits are in a byte, which frankly is "teenager interested in computers" level of basic knowledge.

In fact, IMHO a professional software dev will be reasonably proficient in binary and powers of two in general as a matter of basic knowledge.

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