I interviewed a guy last week who was, to be fair, a pretty accomplished .net programmer. I asked him to explain the concept of buffer and stack overflows on the whiteboard. He didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about. Not the kind of people whose software I want on my PC.
Decades ago I learned not to hire someone who had never programmed assembler, even if I only wanted them to write Visual Basic. Some concept of what on earth a computer actually is turns out to be rather useful, at any level!