Comment by theshrike79

I've seen cases in my career where people knowing the low level things is actually a hindrance.

They start to fight the system, trying to optimise things by hand for an extra 2% of performance while adding 100% of extra maintenance cost because nobody understands their hand-crafted assembler or C code.

There will always be a place for people who do that, but in the modern world in most cases it's cheaper to just throw more money at hardware instead of spending time optimising - if you control the hardware.

If things run on customer's devices, then you need the low level gurus again.