Its not just about having math and other computer science information. Age related discrimination is a huge problem in this industry. Most of the programming jobs out there don't involve detailed interaction with algorithms and data structures in every day work. And if it does, its not like the 80's where you had to visit a library to learn about an algorithm. Access to knowledge has become very cheap and quick. Having a lot of information in your brain in itself has no value.
Young people are ready to work lower salaries, will do work on weekends, late nights and in general a lot more agile in a lot of issues.
In fact the 10000 hour/10 year rule itself is subject to a lot of assumptions like access to information being expensive in terms of time and effort, so having someone on the team with that information would help. These days you have stack overflow and a dozen places on the internet who can much of that at a far more lesser price.
Its getting easier over time to build systems and solve problems.
I can't tell if you're trolling or naive. No serious SDK, Framework or API is built without deep know-how of the domain. You atleast need to be great at data structures (or OOP), design patterns, language design.
Unless you're doing the literal bottom-barrel of engineering work where you don't involve algorithmic know-how, there's no escaping having deep engineering.
Perhaps what offends me most is the notion that "you can just google/stackoverflow it". No you can't. If you don't know your tools, every problem will be a nail and your only tool a hammer. You're not being fast, you're being hasty and creating a lot of waste by moving very slow on the aggregate. It's this attitude that introduces massive bugs in the system because an engineer copy/pasted code without knowing it's implications.
Development is knowledge working; you need to invest in your knowledge tools else you're just moving really slow and you don't even know it.
> Having a lot of information in your brain in itself has no value.
Having a lot of unstructured information in your brain has no value.
If you learn a lot, and then start putting patterns together and build more complex rules out of that - that has value. And by the way, the result of that process is the kind of thing that could be easily transferred to other particular areas.
Looking things up won't do you any good if you don't understand what you find, and you're going to waste time flailing around if you're unable to recognize the class of problem you have (which is what algorithms are for -- they're solutions for classes of problems).
Also, people without understanding of CS fundamentals often unwittingly write dog-slow code.
> Having a lot of information in your brain in itself has no value.
If you think of it as inert info, the accessing of which in the brain is equivalent to reading it on a web site...
But it isn't. Brains, especially in respect to deeply understood domain knowledge, change in response to how they're used.
Experts' minds create shortcuts to information in their area of expertise.
Having more information means having the ability to synthesize it, gain epiphanies that would otherwise be overlooked--and reading someone's blog post about their epiphany isn't the same as having it yourself.
Young people are ready to work lower salaries, will do work on weekends, late nights and in general a lot more agile in a lot of issues.
In fact the 10000 hour/10 year rule itself is subject to a lot of assumptions like access to information being expensive in terms of time and effort, so having someone on the team with that information would help. These days you have stack overflow and a dozen places on the internet who can much of that at a far more lesser price.
Its getting easier over time to build systems and solve problems.