[laksjd]

Imagine you're given a problem that is completely novel in its description yet is actually reducible in some non-trivial way to a well-known NP-complete problem that has great probabilistic algorithms available for it.

Googling the original problem description will (for a novel formulation of the problem) not result in any advantage and implementing a standard algorithm will not work if you need n to be large for your application.

I will admit that it's a slightly contrived example ;)

[saiya-jin]

you just described what maybe 0.001% devs will face, so not really... that's not how studies are done nor intended

[Klockan]

0.001% of devs would be around a few hundred in the whole world, there are way more CS grad students than that...

I'd guess that at you get to at least a few percent if you count grad students, researchers, people working on performance critical stuff like GPU drivers, people working on state of the art tooling like Google internals or large OS libraries etc.