[jimbokun]

"As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it."

Unless you use load balancers in non-trivial ways at scale and really need to understand the ins and outs of how they work to utilize them effectively.

[commandlinefan]

Well, you know that, and I know that, and OP knows that. But it’s likely that OP’s boss not only doesn’t know that, but is mentally incapable of comprehending it. And even if he does (my boss is actually a sharp developer who does understand what’s going on), remember that we all have 8 bosses at any time.

[ClumsyPilot]

You can't generally predict how that knowledge will be useful, load balances don't exist in a vacuum, he might learn about packet structure, fail over and all kind of other stuff directly applicable