I suspect that you've had opportunities to use your math, and had you seen those opportunities you would recognize the potential utility.<p>I say this as someone who periodically finds yet another way to use my math background to help me do things while my co-workers in the same job don't.  Which is why I'm the one who got to do the statistics for evaluating A/B testing, eliminated multiple performance problems others had come to accept, and gets tapped to tackle complex "how do we figure this out" problems from time to time.<p>And yes, I've had the fun of seeing co-workers who theoretically had the same job as me argue that math wasn't useful for programming, while I was sitting there with a list of examples of how I'd recently used my math background.  (But then I got promoted into a different job title and in those discussions those programmers were able to respond that of course I needed more math for reporting, but they didn't need it as web developers.  Never mind that I was the guy who got asked to help when the database had trouble scaling at peak traffic of several million pages/hour...)<p>Really this seems to me to be a variant of the blub paradox.  If you haven't learned to reflexively see the benefits of thinking in some new way, you won't recognize how thinking that way could help with the problems you are solving day in and day out.  Conversely if you have gained those mental skills, you recognize their utility in situations that other people wouldn't dream they are applicable for.