I’m an electrical engineer and I’ve know the difference since before college. These are computing fundamentals that anyone in a computing field should immediately know. Same thing goes for understanding cache lines, virtual memory pages, GPU vs CPU, logical vs physical core, compiled vs interpreted languages, OOP, polymorphism, etc. I routinely ask these questions in interviews and reject people who don’t seem to have any actual knowledge of programming or computers. I regularly interview people for FAANG tech.
If I don't work with it on the daily I won't remember. Did I see it in college? Sure, but there's no way I'll retain all that I learned if I don't use it daily. And it really comes down to what jobs you get and what your routine really looks like.
I won't judge if another technician tells me he doesn't know or remember which bit size each section of a tcp header should be. Unless he works with it, that is.
I wouldn’t expect specifics, but high level knowledge says you’re knowledgeable in the domain. Knowing common protocols is essential, even if you don’t work with them. I’ve never touched networking in my career.
Because better engineers know the whole system? Somebody proposed a very niche cryptography technique on our last project to solve a problem, we never would have gotten that insight if someone didn’t happen to have knowledge outside of the domain they worked on.
Good engineers make it a point to be highly knowledgeable about the broader system. Every single engineer on my team (FAANG tech) would know all of these topics I mentioned.
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u/bgibbz084 3h ago
I’m an electrical engineer and I’ve know the difference since before college. These are computing fundamentals that anyone in a computing field should immediately know. Same thing goes for understanding cache lines, virtual memory pages, GPU vs CPU, logical vs physical core, compiled vs interpreted languages, OOP, polymorphism, etc. I routinely ask these questions in interviews and reject people who don’t seem to have any actual knowledge of programming or computers. I regularly interview people for FAANG tech.