I think that what you seem to be treating as "good CS education" is something I'd be more likely to call "good math education, but probably not great training f

I think that what you seem to be treating as "good CS education" is something I'd be more likely to call "good math education, but probably not great training for programming". A big part of the problem is over-generalization. Here's a reddit comment I posted in a similar discussion not too long ago, touching on that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/3nfbkr/patreon_is_a_flask_app_and_was_hacked_because/cvobo03 https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/3nfbkr/patreon_is_a... The person I was replying to there had made the mistake of assuming that because in these fields of programming, knowledge of data structures, algorithms and big-O characteristics is one of the most important things for performance, that must be true of all fields. When, in fact, it's not true of all fields, and I provided an example of one where it isn't true and where quizzing someone on their big-O cheat sheet wouldn't actually reveal whether the candidate has the most relevant knowledge for what's going on.