This is pointless has nothing to do with that year it is. Companies who need students who know differential equations or linear algebra have always had these requirements (even before computers or programming languages existed). There is no way a humanities student knows this stuff and no way a company wants expend the resources to have them to learn DE on the job...
He applied for a job where knowledge and/or experience in complex mathematics was required and did not get the job because he lacked the qualifications. how is this interesting or even news???
I agree that we could look at it as simply a case of a bad match in the skillset.
But that's also the point right? Everyone with more than two years experience in software development knows skill sets are changing continually. This story is speculating that data analytics will be next the long history of hot/baseline skills for the developer. It does so using the powerful narrative device of not saying directly at all.
Is data analytics going to be the next critical skill for developers like relational databases, object-oriented, or internet technologies has been in the past? Or is it going to be (or already is) the next bioinformatics, an interesting subspecialty but far from being the primary source of demand for software development talent?
There is no comparison to be made here between mathematics and programming languages as far as continually changing skill sets go. Mathematical concepts have had no new paradigms in my entire lifetime. Mathematics progression moves slower than any science or technology that I am aware of. Higher level math fundamentals may be required for data analytic companies because the math needs to be understood and applied to their rules. Figuring out different ways to collect data is not math, it is innovation of technology or psychology perhaps, but the math that this innovation is paired with is not new or changing in any way.
What I am really saying is that data analytics is nothing more than the combination of math and programming. The programming part is evolving quickly, but not the math side.
As well as things like graph algorithms for dealing with Google-scale data. We might even put skills like map/reduce, GPU programming, and some as-yet-undetermined cloud management API into this bucket too.
He applied for a job where knowledge and/or experience in complex mathematics was required and did not get the job because he lacked the qualifications. how is this interesting or even news???