Agressive EEs can cover a lot. I started out designing chips. Agressive CS (Compilers, OS, Data Structures, Databases) can cover a lot. Some of the modern stacks dependencies (npm, blegh) leave you with a lot to comb through. Modern compiler's ability to deal with various level caches and memory architectures, and look-aheads, and TLBs, and what not, can boggle the mind a bit.
One can pretty easily understand all of the sub-systems in isolation (well, it takes more than a couple of years!), but not on ALL of the systems, and complex systems, in total are more than any one mind can reason about in, in total. Too much for one brain to contain the dependency graph.
One can pretty easily understand all of the sub-systems in isolation (well, it takes more than a couple of years!), but not on ALL of the systems, and complex systems, in total are more than any one mind can reason about in, in total. Too much for one brain to contain the dependency graph.