Same boat as the author here, except I switched from physics to software after year three. I had never heard of them until I was _years_ into software engineer

Same boat as the author here, except I switched from physics to software after year three. I had never heard of them until I was _years_ into software engineering. I think this is more common than you may think. I had never dealt with linear algebra in a formal setting, despite leveraging a lot of the concepts, until then.