[simonw]

I agree with you, which is why I didn't say "should be required", I said "should help out quite a lot". I was responding more to the original posts implication (which I may have mis-understood) that front-end engineering isn't a demanding discipline.

I found stuff I learned in my CS degree helped me understand closures in JavaScript for example, and the compilers course I did has helped out with a bunch of things.