Do you think Ayrton Senna knew what kind of thermodynamic happens in the engine? (No)
Would he have been a better racer, if he knew? (No)

I am a programmer, but I have a Mechanical Engineering degree. Everything I learned in school after the age of 14 is inapplicable to writing businnes applications. I do not need to know how C works, because I do not work with C. For 99.9% percent of business applications written in Java, C does not matter. If you want to learn, great, do it. But most likely it will not benefit you in any other way than you can look down on those who did not learn it.

Most of the math you learn after multiplication will not come up in 99% of programming jobs. Learn how the Java garbage collector works if you use Java, but HASKELL/Lisp/C++ is just a nicety, like Spanish or cooking.

Meant competitive.

I agree, it is driven by the greed of the employees.

Code can be transported without any loss of quality, and barely at any cost. So the value of any program equals the the wage of the cheapest laborer who can do it in good quality. Anything above that is an overhead no sane businnes owner should pay. Most of them do not, and the others will be out of businnes sooner or later.

I work at an Eastern European subsidiary of a German software company, we cost less than half of their programmers. Code quality is about the same.
But it is not just about software, car makers have proven that the same quality can be created in Turkey, Poland or Slovakia as in Belgium, Italy, France or Germany, for the fraction of the cost.
The wages in the west are too high. They are artificially kept compatible by the costs imposed by lawmakers on outsourcing.