Software companies aren't the only people who hire developers.
I spent today (I'm a non-technical product owner in an enterprise) discussing middleware which will transform 10,000 miscellaneous transactions from multiple line of business system every night into our ERP. There's lots of domain logic and we're paying the supplier a lump sum more than the annual salary of a new CS or BC grad. It isn't a simple web page.
Say the transformation from source to target with good sorting would take 100 milliseconds. If it took 10,000 times longer, that's 17 minutes - and that would meet my user requirements. If it didn't I'd expect the supplier to fix their SQL indexes. So none of their technical guys need to be good at sorting.
That's a very good point. I'm only speaking from the view of my experience, and my responsibilities and concerns are different than your example. I suppose my initial skepticism of the article is grounded in that we do all we have different concerns, and I felt the article attempted to paint with too broad of a brush. The author would have helped me tremendously had they defined terms like practical programming.
