Comment by venturecruelty

We don't tell chemists they shouldn't spend their formative years learning how to manage electron orbitals. You need to understand the fundamentals of how a computer works, or else you get people who write software with the wrong mental model of the machine (namely, that it's some sort of inscrutable, magic black box). Learning the fundamentals of the machine teaches you that is not, in fact, magic at all, it's just a lot of simple circuits built on top of each other, providing what we know as computation. Will you sling bits in assembly all day at your job? Probably not, but that knowledge is invaluable to being a better programmer.

We make surgeons learn anatomy. We make hardware engineers learn physics. I think we can expect programmers to learn how computers work.