Your comment reflects a common meme that can often be summarized as: "Real World" work doesn't involve the academic nonsense you learn in school.
Many of the people who say this kind of stuff never really mastered the theory, and because they never mastered it they can't really use it, and because they can't really use it they find work that doesn't strictly require it, and then conclude it's useless... It's like when otherwise successful people tell you all that calculus they learned in high school is useless, it's not useless, they just found success in a career that didn't need it.
I resort to my textbooks and academic nonsense all the time. There are often two ways to solve a problem, the first is just code-until-it-works, the second often involves modeling it in some kind of formal structure, and defining the operations over that structure and their properties. Usually, in doing this, the resulting implementation is far less code and far more resilient. But those who are not comfortable with the foundational theory stuff just don't see it and don't even think to approach the problem in that way.
Many of the people who say this kind of stuff never really mastered the theory, and because they never mastered it they can't really use it, and because they can't really use it they find work that doesn't strictly require it, and then conclude it's useless... It's like when otherwise successful people tell you all that calculus they learned in high school is useless, it's not useless, they just found success in a career that didn't need it.
I resort to my textbooks and academic nonsense all the time. There are often two ways to solve a problem, the first is just code-until-it-works, the second often involves modeling it in some kind of formal structure, and defining the operations over that structure and their properties. Usually, in doing this, the resulting implementation is far less code and far more resilient. But those who are not comfortable with the foundational theory stuff just don't see it and don't even think to approach the problem in that way.