I don't believe it is a chicken and egg problem. I believe there aren't that much of a demand in the industry for solving "Math" problems. From an (software ev

I don't believe it is a chicken and egg problem. I believe there aren't that much of a demand in the industry for solving "Math" problems. From an (software even!) engineering perspective, nobody needs to solve the same Math problem twice. All "Math problems" are either solved or are open problems (this is almost by definition). The ones which are already solved do not require re-solving again, which means that in the vast majority of cases a competent (software) engineer only needs to learn how to apply them. I don't know about traditional engineering, but in software, often it's just a matter of importing a library and calling an API. The software development ecosystem has developed to a point where you don't need to know how to implement things, you just need to know what you need. Unless you're an expert specialist in a particular field, you often can't do better than that, because whatever idea you have, most likely somebody more competent than you has already written an open source library for that. I don't think it's useful to contrast general incompetence with a lack of mathematical ability -- though it sometimes correlate somewhat if only because general intelligence often manifests in mathematical ability. There are simply too many unproven assumptions from "math education" => "writing better software". If anything, good software engineers need to be ready to learn, and learning maths outside of formal schooling is just one of the many things they need to do. The general lack of quality in software is a supply and demand problem -- as long as FAANG can afford to pay 200k+ USD to fresh grads with no experience, companies with a smaller budget must make a trade off between lowering quality and not delivering at all. Ironically(?) the market is actually responding. People doing interview prep are learning the minimum subset of mathematics and engineering required for a high paying software job. Then you get people complain about grinding leetcode. Imagine what happens if FAANG companies add abstract set theory to their standard interview questions! (I'm willing to bet this would lower software quality...)