I was also confused about algorithmic skill and software engineering skills. But I got clarification after working in industry for a while. 1) Most of the soft

I was also confused about algorithmic skill and software engineering skills. But I got clarification after working in industry for a while. 1) Most of the software engineering work is product development, just wrapping already existing algorithm and optimized computer program into apis and test and maintain it. 2) There are very few software engineering work involving writing algorithm and optimized computer program. One example, everyone here might have just used mysql database. But if you look into the code, you might see there are complex data structure, and algorithm are being used. https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server Its a good thing to solve these kind of algorithmic problems.