[jonke]

I kind of agree here but for real life working hard problems you need an OR that can code to make performance tweaks and adjust the algorithm in code. Maybe with some help from a programmer('hacker') as a mentor or code reviewer. You could almost take any standard problem and learn to apply a simple standard OR approach and code it but when the shit hit the fan you must have someone to ask what makes the OR thing work/not work. A normal programmer isn't interested in this more low level thing of the OR side.

EDIT: Stop asking for top X if you really are trying to inspire more OR into more software. Most stuff in this world are done by mere mortals and not 1% of hackers. The true hackers of the world can probably already grok both malloc and TSP with timewindow constraints.