Comment by sgarland

Nah, it’s not just that. IME, most devs are completely unaware of how this stuff works. They don’t need to, because there are so many abstractions, and because the industry expectation has shifted such that it isn’t a requirement. I’ve also met some who are aware, but don’t care at all, because no one above them cares.

Tech interviews are wildly stupid: they’ll hammer you on being able to optimally code some algorithm under pressure on a time limit, but there’s zero mention of physical attributes like cache line access, let alone a realistic problem involving data structures. Just once, I’d love to see “code a simple B+tree, and then discuss how its use in RDBMS impacts query times depending on the selected key.”