Computer Science is kind of special in that unlike other areas it is not split so much into engineering and theory (like Nuclear engineering or Nuclear Physics, etc.) by name. That means all the scrub engineers are stuck with all the theoretical people. If you are just going to be doing engineering, then very little to basically none. If you are doing theoretical then you will need to be pretty good at linear algebra and graph theory. In fact, just go learn Discrete Math. There are too mmany idiots who don't knwo jack fucking shit in engineering already, so just go learn amth and don't be like a huge chunk of computer engineers who are dumb and need somone else to go after them and fix their shit mistakes. Learn math or gtfo and save people who know what they are doing a lot of headaches. You will also get laughed at a lot less if you learn the math since you won't be as incompetent.

If you don't like math, programming is not for you. It's like a lifeguard not liking water.

i like maths and am very good at it just wanted to know how apps and code come in contact with it

take it easy man

I don't think you realize what a pain incompetent programmers are. I was being very nice.

It really depends on what type of applications you are writing.  I'm a web developer and rarely use math outside of our invoicing system. Graphics programmers and hardware engineers use math probably more than anyone else.  Most other disciplines are somewhere in between.

And I agree with vlad about bad programmers. I've got some horror stories to tell.  For instance, I took over a project from an idiot a few years ago. Part of the site generated reports for users to view. These reports were essentially articles written by health experts on various topics, like heart disease, or medications/supplements/herbal remedies.  Each paragraph of the report was its own record in the database. The original developer created a page with nested ASP.NET controls that eventually ran up to 5 levels deep.  At each level he would re-request the data from the SQL server.  Finally at the 5th level he would output the paragraph. When you requested a report, it could take up to 10-12 seconds to load the page.  After looking through the trace data, I saw that his method was causing in some cases over 300 requests to the SQL server. I re-wrote the page to get all the data in one call and the reports now load in less than a second. If we had actually released the reports as he wrote them, it would have completely crippled any server we could have put it on.

That's incompetence.

Actually they are here to make the good programmers shine ;)

Software developer is probably the only job I know where the productivity and performances can vary so widely from one employee to the next..

Your statement makes zero sense.

I've been trying to convince my boss to let me send a card to the previous developer here (who was an idiot) on the aniversary of his firing, thanking him for my continued employment.

Interesting, depending on how you define productivity, it's also the field wehre productivity != performance.