[sidlls]

These skills have helped me at every single job I've had, including my current one, where I've employed the skill a couple of times to discover bugs or unintended side-effects in third-party library code. For context I've worked in the industry for about 15 years now, in roles ranging from low-level programming on real-time systems to (currently) high level machine learning work.

It might be niche, but it can also be a differentiator--even if I'm not the fastest coder or the best architect I have these other skills that make me valuable at critical times. That's worth something anywhere.

And it's not even knowledge of C or C++, or syscalls or whatever: it's just basic "use a debugger" (not merely pantomime the commands, but understand what's going on) skills that can be the real game changer.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Totally agree with this. I have never written C or C++ in a professional manner but just knowing how to debug and compile it has proved to be an invaluable skill. Lots of software ecosystems often have some underlying C/C++ code that they are calling out to and being able to dive into that when there is an issue is an incredible skill to have.

Make, Ninja etc. are fairly straightforward compared to something like Gradle and just knowing my way around that and Clang/GnuCC has gotten me a lot farther in my career.