> I have a degree but honestly can't say I've ever really used anything from algorithms or compilers courses on the job
I ended up having a job writing programming language tools for a bit. Then there was some graph stuff one time in 10 years. It can come up occasionally. I still find it's something nice to know.
A more realistic example might be understanding the limits of regular expressions/languages and what they can/can't do well. Like the bus conversation I overheard glorifying some "smart" guy parsing XML in a stored procedure using regexes.
I ended up having a job writing programming language tools for a bit. Then there was some graph stuff one time in 10 years. It can come up occasionally. I still find it's something nice to know.
A more realistic example might be understanding the limits of regular expressions/languages and what they can/can't do well. Like the bus conversation I overheard glorifying some "smart" guy parsing XML in a stored procedure using regexes.