A good higher education as an excellent foundation for a software engineer (classical math school)?

Question

Algorithms

A question without a twist.
Please give examples when knowledge of a certain topic that you or someone else learned at the best technical university would significantly distinguish them from others in the profession, people who studied only programming, without a classical school (Kaspersky calls them coders, according to him there are many of them in India and China). What is this body of knowledge? How specifically does it affect design and development?
For example, this is knowledge of a certain algorithm, without which we would incur more costs (lower productivity) and receive less money. Here, for example, Yandex or Google (in the first case, the founders immediately studied old school in our universities, in the second, the parents of one of the founders).
This is probably my attempt to explain to myself why good techies are worth their weight in gold (I have no doubt).
In general, the question is very free, maybe the theme itself implies that. Describe your own vision of this situation. You can’t put her in the Procrustean bed, and you don’t need to.

Answer 1

It seems to me that Yandex has come up with so many new things that it’s simply stupid to say that the founders learned this at an old-school university, and even when they graduated from such technologies they didn’t dream.
Practice has shown that algorithms and mathematics for the most part are weakly connected, well, except perhaps for the implementation of mat algorithms.
Yes, because people who are good at self-education go to the Olympiads, they do not participate in them on the knowledge gained at a university or school. Accordingly, there are simply capable people with a wild desire to program, and their brain flexibility does not go off scale, it’s just that there are few abilities and an infinite amount of desire to program. Oh, I somehow won 1st place in the city, it's a pity it was the first and last year of my participation.
Why are good techies worth their weight in gold?
It's just that they are not on the market, there is a shortage, as with gold in its time.
So I posted a vacancy for $ 2,000 for a full-time programmer, two real applications, and both cannot work full-time remotely. The situation is the same with top management, there are enough vacancies with an annual salary with a bonus of 10 million in a rush, but there are no top managers.

Answer 2

Knowledge of physics and mathematics directly helped me, but in a very peculiar area - I then wrote a system for collecting and analyzing data for various measuring instruments. And of course, it was necessary to understand what data is being collected and how it should be processed. =)
And in most cases, the knowledge of mathematics obtained at the university, as such, is rather useless, and, in my opinion, is not a competitive advantage. Yes, this is the development of brains, and a useful base. But you can build this base on your own - the university does not provide any unique opportunity in this case.