I should have been more specific in my trite original post.
I think at the college hire / intern level, its not quite as useful as everyone is so green .. so people screen based on college / attempts at raw brainpower games with brain teaser puzzles and stuff.
On the more experienced end of the scale, I'm often surprised to see how many resumes with 3-5 years experience are basically Python-only. This, in the absence of something else in the resume that speaks to domain expertise or something.. its definitely a less exciting prospect to me.
The 2000s version of this were Java-only devs and people who acted as though we didn't need to know how the hardware worked anymore because Java abstracted it away. You see this attitude with some cloud/k8s type dev today.
In both situations, naively.. yes you don't need to understand much about the hardware for your basic implementations.
Arguably once you get into moderate levels of complexity you actually have higher cognitive overhead because you need to understand how the underlying hardware behaves and how the abstraction layers between you & it interplay..
