I feel the same way, you can still write decent code without knowing all the nitty gritty deep-down details, I'm a firm believer in learning as much as possible about lower-level, Eventually.. but its often a case of Too Much Information for someone starting out and, with Java, for example, it does garbage collection for you, so as long as you learn some basic patterns of use, the code shouldn't become overly maintainable. If they're using C# or Java, I'm pretty sure its not some mission critical app that has to be uber fast or the wheels will fall off of the company's entire operations