It is often echoed that mathematicians make excellent software engineers, and that their logic-adjacent work will translate efficiently into coding and designing.
I have found this to be almost universally untrue. I might even say the inverse is true.
While I and many of my peers have capacity to navigate the mathematical world, it certainly is not what sets us (at least me) apart when designing clever algorithms and software tricks.
Point being: I dont think the property/trait that makes good programmers is mathematical literacy.
I would love to hear what others experience is regarding this.
I tend to agree. I think this attitude is something of a holdover from the early days of computer science, when of academics from all the other, existing fields, mathematicians were usually the best fit. Now that we have formal computer scientists, computer engineers, and software engineers, this is no longer the case.
In my experience, when someone from a purely mathematical background tries to program or explain something for programmers, they often (but not always, to be fair) insist vehemently on sticking to methods and algorithms that at best confuse the issue in a programming setting, and sometimes even run counter to how the computing hardware works, reducing performance. In these situations the rationale given is usually something along the lines of, “Listen, we mathematicians have been doing it this way for X hundred years, so that’s the way it should be done!”