I'm a successful consulting software engineer with a masters and a charge-out rate of $1000/day, which I've been billing at for over a year, and not once have I

I'm a successful consulting software engineer with a masters and a charge-out rate of $1000/day, which I've been billing at for over a year, and not once have I had to implement a linked list. My clients love me. This kind of 'orthodoxy' (you must know about X) confuses computer science (purely academic) with business outcomes (what engineers are paid to deliver).