My thoughts exactly.<p>The worst part is: you don&#x27;t even know what you are missing in the first place.<p>Since we are all into anecdotes today, let me give you mine:<p>My co-founder once called me with some aggravation, because he was developing a feature for a client that needed, in a nutsheel, to figure out which points, out of a few million, were inside some arbitrary geographical boundaries.<p>His naive algorithm was taking minutes to process all the data, but the requirement was for real-time(ish).<p>Turns out I didn&#x27;t even get to apply the space partitioning techniques that I learned in class. Just explaining to him the concept of pre-calculating bounding boxes was more than enough for him to implement a solution in less than an hour.<p>Since he had not even heard of them, he didn&#x27;t know what to look for, or that there was an entire class of algorithms and data structures in computer graphics dedicated to that sort of problem.<p>Don&#x27;t even get me started with things like dynamic programming, or mathematical logic. Are you seriously going to study something like that for months, if there&#x27;s no-one pushing you?