When I was an undergrad and systems admin at a major American university, the Ph.D. students would often come to me for programming advice. We even had one guy

When I was an undergrad and systems admin at a major American university, the Ph.D. students would often come to me for programming advice. We even had one guy who was a Ph.D. candidate, Java certified up to some awful level but had never written a Java program. Ever. Grad students are usually good at conceptual stuff. They couldn't code well, and they needed help setting up a database. But I couldn't do the breakthrough stuff they were doing. (I'm still not sure what a wavelet is:-). It's as simple as that.