[Guvante]

I would categorize things as "does someone on the team need to know this":

* Why does a key appear on the screen when I push a button on my keyboard: no

* How is an HTTPS connection created: generally no

* How is the JavaScript library deployed: 100% yes

You might be able to throw something together that works without understanding that it is a JavaScript library with a bootstrap HTML page but if no one on your team understand that you will eventually need to find someone that does to solve a problem.

[Kalium]

> * How is an HTTPS connection created: generally no

I would think that people doing web development probably benefit from a working knowledge of DNS, TLS, and PKI. Without those, I would expect a lot of readily avoidable problems with HTTPS.

In general I advocate that software engineers should have a functional, if abstract, understanding of how computers work on various levels. They might not need a detailed understanding, but people often benefit in unexpected ways from understanding the systems they work with.

[Spivak]

In 2022 that person is ops not dev. None of my devs have any knowledge [1] about TLS, DNS, or even TCP. The only interaction devs have with the messy outside world is Rack/WSGI, their DB ORM, their Queue/Job abstraction, and the AWS client libs.

[1] Not like they literally don’t know but that their code has no interaction with it.

[10000truths]

That veil of abstraction gets pierced very quickly the moment you need to debug an issue or regression in your application. I'm working on an internal application that's using Django in my current job, and there are plenty of instances where we've had to run an EXPLAIN on the generated MySQL query to identify performance bottlenecks.