I think you over-simplify — engineers slot into different roles/disciplines within large companies.
There are going to be engineers that have to deal with driver-level code that know full well the limitations of memory constraints, thread overhead, etc.
No doubt you're describing the other half — the app engineers that use the API/SPI's. It might even be argued though that, given a well defined API, they should not have to worry about how much memory a JPEG requires ... the API decompressing the image only when rendering to the destination or what-have-you. Pointers, memory management should be managed by the low-level parts of the language or OS/kernel.
I happen to like the bit-banging, pointer walking, free-wheeling world of straight C but I don't begrudge higher level languages that are designed to tackle the more modern pressures of concurrency and "asynchronicity".
There are going to be engineers that have to deal with driver-level code that know full well the limitations of memory constraints, thread overhead, etc.
No doubt you're describing the other half — the app engineers that use the API/SPI's. It might even be argued though that, given a well defined API, they should not have to worry about how much memory a JPEG requires ... the API decompressing the image only when rendering to the destination or what-have-you. Pointers, memory management should be managed by the low-level parts of the language or OS/kernel.
I happen to like the bit-banging, pointer walking, free-wheeling world of straight C but I don't begrudge higher level languages that are designed to tackle the more modern pressures of concurrency and "asynchronicity".