I agree that a full linux distro compile as a matter of practice is a waste of time. But, doing it a few times is good if you want to understand your tools.

I don’t believe that top tier engineers just skip learning things because they might turn out to be dead-ends or incorporated into tools by someone else; in my experience they tend to be extremely interested in things that seem like minutiae to others when working on the bleeding edge, often implementing their own systems just to more fully understand the problem space.

If it’s a day job for someone and they are not ambitious, fine. But we are at hacker news. I would bet 99%+ of top tier software talent could tell you practical experience with ralph loops this year, or a homegrown variety, simply because they are an attempt to solve a very real engineering problem (early exit, shitty code/incorrect responses, poor context window length and capacity), and top tier software people expect more control of their engineering environment, and success using their tools than they’d get by just saying ‘meh, whatever, I don’t get this and I’ll just wait it out.’