I think the key difference here is differentiating between a "software engineer" and a "programmer." It's a very blurry line, but the idea should shed some new light on arguments of the form "I've never used college calculus to develop web-apps, therefore math is useless for a software engineer."

This isn't meant to disparage programmers; I am merely saying we should take note when we have our "programmer" hat on, vs. when we're wearing our software engineer fedora.