I find this incredibly shortsighted and can sometimes hinder one's career. Case in point, Consistent Hashing was "advanced", yet now it is a cornerstone and common knowledge in building systems. Paxos was considered advanced and "never required", yet it became the building block when Google told the world how their Chubby works. Compressed-sensing was a research topic some years ago, yet now it is used in advanced image processing (and yeah, the industry does need "advanced" use cases). If you track SIGGRAPH, many of the so-called advanced theories are adopted in games and CGI systems. You thought engineers could produce photo realistic waves without understanding large-scale Navier-Stokes equations? You thought we could enjoy realistic clouds, fumes, fires in games without engineers studying particle systems? You thought that engineers do not need to study complex optimization to build airline booking systems? Even for the traditional "IT", you thought SAP didn't require advanced data structures and algorithms for their logistics systems? You thought IBM didn't need algorithms and maths to help their customers optimize their warehouse management systems or help the military track their lost weapons including tanks?

Seriously, the list can go on and on for days if not weeks. And a personal lesson: I started to learn about deep learning and large-scale machine learning back in 2010 and they started to pick up steams in the bay area. Yet I thought that level of knowledge was "too advanced" for a systems engineer, so I kept deferring diving deep into the area. Boy was I wrong. Hopefully a new generation of engineers would keep their curious eyes more open than me.