That's the thing, it is useful, so I don't blame companies for wanting people who know CS theory.
And when I hire people, even though I hate doing adversarial whiteboard coding, I will probe to find out if people understand a bit of theory.
You can get a lot of work done without theoretical knowledge, (but the end result is often not as good, and it usually takes longer). Combine that with the fact that CS theory is hard, and you get a lot of people complaining about how theoretical CS is useless outside of academia.
It's basically an extension of "no one needs to know math beyond arithmetic in the real world".
And when I hire people, even though I hate doing adversarial whiteboard coding, I will probe to find out if people understand a bit of theory.
You can get a lot of work done without theoretical knowledge, (but the end result is often not as good, and it usually takes longer). Combine that with the fact that CS theory is hard, and you get a lot of people complaining about how theoretical CS is useless outside of academia.
It's basically an extension of "no one needs to know math beyond arithmetic in the real world".