For myself at least: absolutely yes. That's actually some of the first stuff they taught us. Would I want to be interviewed on whether I can implement a linked list from the top of my head in an arbitrary language and 100% correctly in a high stress interview situation? Absolutely not. (and a linked list in the end is something really really easy if you ask me)
Does that in any way relate to what I'm doing right now? A little! This will differ depending on who exactly you work for and in what role. It certainly helps to have learned this stuff. I can honestly say that it was fun seeing how regular expressions actually work, how you implement a parser for it etc. But then you learn as well (right there in university) that you better use a parser generator after just having defined the grammar instead of writing it yourself. How many jobs are out there that require you to write a grammar for something? To create a new language? Very very few. There's a market for "boring business software X" software developers.
Is it the most important thing I consider when hiring? Absolutely not. We also don't pay FAANG salaries where I work. Do I want capable software developers? Smart guys for sure. People that are curious, willing and able to learn, writing maintainable code. Guys that if I tell them that there's a hidden n^3 algorithm in what they just wrote and it _does_ matter for the (relatively small but large enough) volumes of data this will run on can look up/ask for what that means.
EDIT: interesting down votes. I hope someone will reply to explain. I certainly don't see why we can't have a civil discussion especially given that we seem to agree on it having been good to get a solid university education. FWIW I have a Master's in Computer Science. From a country that values non university education (Germany - where you can do vocational training to become a programmer. Just like you can become a master carpenter through that system).
Fully will back you up on this. One does not have to be a metallurgist to be the best welder. In fact, your metallurgist might get a bit too clever playing with alloys when they need to focus more on getting the weld clean.
It’s also really downplaying how much one can learn when they need it for an application - yes it’s true you have to know about something to go after learning it, but there’s nothing stopping someone picking up a book when they get stuck to learn about what they don’t yet know.
Much of a CS course is nice to have knowledge for many programmers, and can be plenty beneficial. But a CS degree is there to show you theory not teach you how to program - the amount of people with degrees that are very poor at even basic programming is not as low as you’d think.
I've learned over and over again that Big O is a nice theoretical model, but often doesn't translate. The famous case is std::list looking better than std::vector but almost always being worse, but I've seen plenty of others.
I work on a very large system, but spend far more time chasing down poor performance due to emergent behavior than I do worrying about Big O on some small piece.
Algorithms? yes, basic algorithms and sorting and Big O, none of which I've needed in 10 years of professional and hobby dev work. But to say "well you learned data structures and you use hashmaps and arrays so obviously it helped" is a very strange defense of academia. I can also learn "datastructures" online in a few days of studying as a new dev, so that's not really a good defense of 4 years of study.
