Most of the people mentioned above held more senior positions than me at the time I worked with them, and all of them considered a formal education and computer science and skills in algorithmic problem-solving to not be important for a successful career. That mindset was either condoned or celebrated at many places I worked in. The people I wrote above weren’t considered bad performers.

If I had to categorize the “no need for education, no need for algorithms” crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics.

Perhaps I’ve grown too resentful of dealing with people who take shortcuts where shortcuts are not supposed to be taken.