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They would be a bad fit for a few software engineering jobs. I don’t deny that those concepts are fundamental, but the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there are about: designing apis, calling apis, writing sql queries, fixing perf. issues, writing yaml config files, etc. You can spend years working for companies in which you would never touch the topic of graphs, for example. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t need to be aware of the concept of graphs in case you need to deal with them. Another story is whether you need to know from first principles (or from memory) how to traverse a graph in different ways.

I think the most underrated skill is to know what you don’t know. To know your limits. I know that graphs exist and that they are useful in certain circumstances. I don’t know how to implement the associated algorithms. Same goes for almost any other important topic like virtual memory management , security, performance, etc.




Do those majority of software engineer jobs never need to traverse a directory or process a complicated multi-layered JSON object?


I actually did that last week (parse a json object from an http response). But I used a well known library for the language we use around here. I mean, I also rely on automatic GCs and compilers… and while I saw the theoretical side of such topics years ago in the university, I cannot implement a single algorithm related to them (because I don’t do that on daily basis)




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