I agree there is a benefit, but it depends pretty heavily on what your career goals are.
I think learning the lower-level details of how computers work is more of a specialization nowadays – people who specialize in digital circuit design would want to learn about this, and could get a career in designing FPGAs and ASICs. A layer of abstraction above that, you have people who specialize in operating systems, and you could get a job in kernel development. Above that, you have servers and databases, above that, you have front-end app development, and above that, you have data science and artificial intelligence.
Each of these layers have lots of domain specific knowledge. But the purpose of an undergraduate course is to prepare students for choosing a specialization, not to teach them about all possible domain specific knowledge they would need for every possible career path, there isn’t enough time for that.
Learning in university how computers worked was invaluable and helped me make my career choices, especially in regqrds to embedded systems engineering, which you seem to have forgotten about.
Not everyone in every college program takes every single course that is offered. There’s plenty of material and surely interest for at least one embedded course which would cover the basics.
Software engineering isn’t typically a degree offered, and the realm of firmware is dependent on school/region of the world you live in… But computer science is categorically not software engineering. People often incorrectly conflate the two, but they are distinct.
There is a practical benefit for learning how computers work at a lower level, because the computers aren’t going to just build themselves. Yet.
I agree there is a benefit, but it depends pretty heavily on what your career goals are.
I think learning the lower-level details of how computers work is more of a specialization nowadays – people who specialize in digital circuit design would want to learn about this, and could get a career in designing FPGAs and ASICs. A layer of abstraction above that, you have people who specialize in operating systems, and you could get a job in kernel development. Above that, you have servers and databases, above that, you have front-end app development, and above that, you have data science and artificial intelligence.
Each of these layers have lots of domain specific knowledge. But the purpose of an undergraduate course is to prepare students for choosing a specialization, not to teach them about all possible domain specific knowledge they would need for every possible career path, there isn’t enough time for that.
Learning in university how computers worked was invaluable and helped me make my career choices, especially in regqrds to embedded systems engineering, which you seem to have forgotten about.
Not everyone in every college program takes every single course that is offered. There’s plenty of material and surely interest for at least one embedded course which would cover the basics.
Heck, all you need is one tight real-time requirement and suddenly how the computer works is important.
For many modern systems, the solution to that is to have a whole separate CPU (generally just a basic coprocessor).
That’s not computer science. That’s electrical engineering (oe in some schools computer engineering).
Computer engineering covers the intersection of EE and CS, but bootloaders and device drivers are still within the realm of software engineering.
Software engineering isn’t typically a degree offered, and the realm of firmware is dependent on school/region of the world you live in… But computer science is categorically not software engineering. People often incorrectly conflate the two, but they are distinct.