I reckon that's a good question to ask. In my personal experience - very rarely, only in cases when building reusable components or working directly with hardwa

I reckon that's a good question to ask. In my personal experience - very rarely, only in cases when building reusable components or working directly with hardware. The truth is the answer will depend entirely upon which field of programming you are working in. Most programmers are building stuff for clients (like websites, software etc.) wherein programming is just a minor part of the process. Also, most of the programmers I've spoken to rarely use any computer science theory because of the state of RAD - mostly everything is already implemented, tested and optimized. Sounds to me like you would be more suited towards the engineering side of things rather than traditional 'software' development. I'd say you'd be pretty well suited to game development which usually involves a lot of math and physics as well as optimizing. Anything hardware related should probably fit your aforementioned requirements.