I'm guessing most of the downvotes are due to the confusion between software engineering and computer science.

From wikipedia:

Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the science of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.

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I think you are talking about software engineers and everyone else is defending computer scientists.

The excessive downvoting has become something of a recent fad here. I'd have put your comments to -1, but not further, because I do, like apparently many, believe that your notions are fundamentally flawed.

Complexity theory isn't hand-wavey-ultra-complicated-irrelevant CS; it's first / second semester stuff. It's fundamental enough that it's a cognate for most lots of physics, math and engineering students. That's to say, that it's relevant enough that if you're even doing something moderately related to computer science that it's worth knowing.

Are there a lot of jobs where you don't need to know this stuff? Well, I think there are a lot of jobs where you can get by without knowing basic CS, but it'd still benefit you from time to time to be able to apply these sorts of abstractions.

"Why is this function so slow?"

"Its runtime is quadratic."

"Huh?"

In my particular case, not knowing fundamentals of CS theory would cut me out of being able to work on precisely the problems that I find most interesting in programming.

I understand the theory perfectly, having a pretty good degree in CE. My argument has nothing to do with my personal situation, I'm running an argument based on a theoretical situation.

If you look at any other field containing "engineers", the mathematical basics are not abstracted away over time. Mechanical engineers have taken courses in math and physics; that part never goes away. Technicians are the guys who may have impressive technical knowledge and skills but never learned the theory behind it. From the perspective of the old-fashioned engineers, if a programmer calls himself a "Software Engineer" instead of a "Computer Programmer", he'd better have some fundamentals to back it up. (Of course not all programmers need to be engineers -- technicians are great. But somebody in the building needs to known why things work they way they do.)

Actually, you're right. My study is in Computer Engineering with focus on robotics, so my focus has been different so far.

Search engines and scientific computing spend a lot of time searching for more efficient algorithms and more efficient approximations of algorithms when the size of the data sets become ridiculously large. They might not be "real world" enough for you, but I would like to work at a search engine after I graduate.