I focused on algorithms in grad school and I've had some kind of programming job for (fuck) 12 years now, so I guess I'm nearly in programming puberty. I believe algorithms touches on something fundamental and provides a foundation that cannot be avoided. However, a house is more than the foundations. Algorithms does not touch on any engineering issues like software maintenance, productively achieving a goal (you can spend your life on interesting tangents) or (generally) performance of systems as a whole.