I have yet to need to know or discuss failure modes of the GC by heart, how to detect them and work around them by heart
Knowing - and having experience of - the failure modes of your platform is one of those things that is invaluable.
Knowledge of GC issues in the JVM is something that indicates (a) you've worked on applications that tax the JVM, and (b) you are the person who people turn to when the shit hits the fan.
Sure, Googling will help here, but you need to have a pretty good understanding of the problem space in order to understand what to Google for. For example, how do you get from "the application is slow" to a query for "sizing the New Generation in the JVM garbage collector" unless you already know when to suspect GC issues, how to use jvmstat etc etc?
Knowing - and having experience of - the failure modes of your platform is one of those things that is invaluable.
Knowledge of GC issues in the JVM is something that indicates (a) you've worked on applications that tax the JVM, and (b) you are the person who people turn to when the shit hits the fan.
Sure, Googling will help here, but you need to have a pretty good understanding of the problem space in order to understand what to Google for. For example, how do you get from "the application is slow" to a query for "sizing the New Generation in the JVM garbage collector" unless you already know when to suspect GC issues, how to use jvmstat etc etc?