[ascar]

I guess it depends what you want to work on and what your career goals are. I think my mechanic vs mechanical engineer example is actually a pretty good analogy of actual conditions. You have (many) people learning how to use tools and fix known problems (like mechanics, or e.g. CRUD developers) versus the others that actually need to solve problems with unknown solutions or optimize existing systems (the engineers). Maybe also with known solutions, but with a far deeper theoretical knowledge as a base for doing that.

Yes, the majority of work is on solved problems and we need far more mechanics than engineers. But it's not such a clear cut and a lot of actual software engineers work on solved problems most of their time and only spend a small amount of time on the engineering part (which is probably similar to other engineering disciplines). But when you spend the small amount of time on engineering work these basics are important and I realized multiple times that I could make better decisions because of it. And I'm kind of certain that's the case for most engineers with an academic background or self-taught basics though they might not even realize it.