My economics-studying roommate had an optimization problem that required a lot of RAM. He had 32 GB (that was >10 years ago). His program crashed with an out of memory exception. He was rich enough to simply upgrade his system to 64 GB.

To my CS eyes, this sounded weird. Turns out he was initializing arrays manually instead of in a loop, so the compiler didn't recognize possible optimizations in the program. I changed his program and it ran twice as fast in half the memory. But he had already fixed his problem without 2 years of studying CS.

Software is about solving problems. Professors in particular have exams, staff, their own work, student requests, external mail and international collaboration to worry about. I bet that once the program stops working, he'll make a student fix the problem within 3 weeks. That's a fine approach and way better than learning C++ yourself.

It's a good example and I think it generalizes. For instance, I'm capable of some minor repairs for appliances, but if some problem seems to be contained in the PCB and I can just replace it for $50 (or whatever) I'll just do that. I don't own an oscilloscope and only barely know how to use it--so yes, I'm sure I've spent $50 when I could have just desoldered some 25 cent part, but it's far more costly for me to learn how to diagnose and fix these sorts of problems than to just buy my way out.

I learned how to do one profession to a high standard and maybe aspects of some others to a lesser standard, but it's just smart to be mindful of how we want to spend our limited skill-development budget.