I had a job interview today for a Job position as developer on an important site

Question

I had a job interview today for a Job position as developer on an important site. They asked tonnes of programming language related questions, which I managed to answer without problems, but then they started asking question about how TCP/IP requests were made once I made a request on my PC to a web server. I did received those contents as a student, but I dont remember them well, because I'm working mostly in web development, my question is:

As a software developer, mainly working on web applications, do I need to have extensive knowledge of TCP/IP and how routers manage requests or it's just black box knowledge to me?

Explanation / Answer

This kind of knowledge comes in very useful very infrequently.

For example, when your ops team sets up your production site behind a router/firewall/load balancer which is set up slightly differently from the one in your test environment and you get a problem related to that, it will serve you well to spot that quickly and talk to ops, rather than digging for some oddity in code. It will serve you even better to be able to understand their language when you have that conversation.

But I really don't understand why people put so much weight on this stuff in interviews, especially when it's for a junior programmer. It is certainly not essential knowledge for everyone on a team and you can be taught.

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