I work for a FAANG company. I don't want to sound conceited and I apologize if my first line gave such a vibe.
I have been in the industry for 10 years. Most of which I spent working backend, high scale systems. I understand TCP and how to setup load balancers, think in terms of microservices etc.
But, I always feel some of the distributed systems engineers I work with have knowledge of file systems, concurrency, etc. Recently one of my friend working for a good company interviewed for a sister team. He was rejected. The engineer who interviewed him told me that he was great as a general backend engineer but he didn't have systems knowledge they were looking for.
I feel it is a chicken and egg problem. People don't want to hire if you don't have system knowledge for some roles. And the only way to develop that knowledge seems to be by working in those roles.
When I interviewed I had to brush up semaphores, mutexes, spin locks, virtual memory etc and had moderate luck in clearing some interviews. But I don't use those concepts every day.
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