[nickysielicki]

My feeling is that the quality of software engineering has gone up dramatically in the past decade.

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Pipelines and caches and paging and virtual memory are stupidly complicated in modern processors. If you claim to understand these things and you don't either work at the company or have an NDA with the company so that you can implement drivers, you're probably full of shit.

What I can't stand are the "highly-ranked" schools that introduce students to a very basic and abstract (and outdated) notion of these topics, and students enter the workforce overconfident that they have understood the topic. You haven't understood the topic, and having some rough notion of the topic can often times be worse than if you didn't know anything at all.

tl;dr: Modern processors are proprietary IP and you should be skeptical of anyone who claims to deeply understand it but doesn't work for the company making it. You do not need to understand how one works to be a great software engineer.

https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf