[nulld3v]

The average web CRUD developer never needs to touch any of this stuff.

- Numeric types? Who cares? I know min, I know max. I take number from user and insert it in database. For calculations with money, I use integer cents.

- Bit-fields? I work in Java, what are bitfields?

- IP addresses? I am web dev loper, not network engineer. I don't need to deal with netmasks.

- Cryptography? Me no understand. Me use Let's Encrypt. Is secure, no?

- Compression? Browser do gzip for me. Me no care.

- Colors? I pick the nice color from the color wheel.

- Binary? What is binary? I only use binary when I want users to upload a file. Then I put the files on S3.

Well I do embedded dev as a hobby now so I know this stuff. But for a long time I didn't know how many bits were in a byte simply because I never really needed that knowledge.

[feoren]

Look, it's fine if you want to be hobbyist making some personal website that doesn't store PII or take user submissions. But we're talking about career software developers here. If you want to make a career out of it, this attitude is not only harmful to your career, but dangerous to your company. Besides: do you really not want to actually be good at what you do?

[nulld3v]

My attitude is: I learn whatever I need to learn to get things done.

And for a long time, I've just never needed to learn about how many bits were in a byte.

The only time I've ever needed to deal with individual bits in Java was when I was working with flags or parsing binary formats. Both of which are extremely rare when doing generic server dev.

You can even do rudimentary binary reverse engineering without any knowledge of bits. I remember running programs through a disassembler, looking for offending JMPs and then patching them out in a hex editor with 0x90.

Not having knowledge is not a problem as long as you know that you are missing that knowledge.

[Takennickname]

You're being facetious.

You have an artificially high bar so you can gatekeep people from being smart and be the arbiter of who's smart and who's not. What you don't realize is most people don't give a crap and easily hundreds of billions worth of software is sold every year by developers who don't know about anything you mentioned.

Your attitude is also inappropriate for a place called "hacker news" where people are resourceful try to do the most with whatever they have. Maybe you want to go to /r/compsci

[LoganDark]

> competent software engineer

Interesting term to conflate with "developer".

You don't have to be a "competent software engineer" to be a developer, and in fact, we were never talking about being a "competent software engineer".

These developers do not get jobs as "competent software engineer"s, do not train to be a "competent software engineer", and do not care about being a "competent software engineer". And yet they make things that work perfectly fine! I'm sorry that you think handling PII or having a career (ooo) has anything to do with being a "competent software engineer".

> But we're talking about career software developers here.

I don't remember the name of this fallacy but it sucks, knock it off.