[maxgee]

You're doing a disservice to yourself and the people who have to work on (or more likely fix) your code by having this attitude. Plenty of people are capable of producing great work and still spending the time to actually understand the systems they are working on.

There aren't that many giants; there are a lot of people with a few years of experience that think/claim they're giants.

[jonathaneunice]

Mmmm... We'll just have to disagree on this. I can track a great number of octaves, from business strategy down to operating system scheduling and locking strategies, CPU instruction pipelines and scheduling, semiconductor fabrication techniques, and even down to the lifetime exergy of the whole equipment/software/facilities supply chain. But I can only do a little bit at a time, an as-needed basis. I can't be too concerned with instruction set design or supply chains while I'm optimizing an SQL query or building a D3.js web visualization. It's just too remote from the task at hand. If you, in contrast, can simultaneously understand and reason about every technology along the continuum from delivered apps and services down to the impedance constraints in the CPU layout process, good show! That's a surpassingly rare skill, but perhaps there are some Sherlocks among us.

[maxgee]

I think it's obvious that I'm not advocating you have innate knowledge of everything down to semiconductor fabrication in order to be a competent javascript programmer. I would argue you want at least a basic understanding of the internals of the software you're relying on.

You're writing SQL queries and claim you don't have the time to research how the database you're using works internally without destroying your productivity? You can write SQL without knowing the database's indexing strategy or how it optimizes queries, but it's likely to be of a lesser quality than someone who has taken the time to do so.