"A knowledge of algorithms doesn't teach you to pick the right problems to solve." That is true. To create a application, one needs a Use Case. A Use Case will

"A knowledge of algorithms doesn't teach you to pick the right problems to solve." That is true. To create a application, one needs a Use Case. A Use Case will provide the most abstract solution to what the app will be doing. Then you can take the top down design approach, by dividing the Use Case into a several abstract sub problems. That is known as code architecture and belongs to System Engineering. The System Engineer needs a domain-expert help to identify what problems that needs to be solved. Then.. Programming is carrying out those abstract sub-problems (interfaces) to become a concrete solution using a specific programming language. To complete such a task, one needs a person that knows his/hers algorithms design techniques, sorting, searching, string processing, graph problems, combinatorial problems, geometric problems and numerical problems. And lastly, the analysis of the respective algorithms. Once you know what to solve, its just a matter of being able to carry out the task. I think you might have confused the programmers job with the job of actually creating the entire software - which in general terms is non-sense. To sum up: The software engineer (the project lead) takes care of identifying the sub-problems, after creating the Use Case with the domain expert (often the customer). The programmer solves those sub-problems bottoms up, by focusing on creating the atomic parts as efficient as possible.