I’ve never laid bricks but in other trades I’ve worked in, well, a lot of people understood basics of the chemistry of the products we used. It’s useful to understand how they work together safely, if they can be exposed to different environments, if they’re heat-safe, cold-safe, do they off-gas, etc.

Paints, wood finishes, adhesives, oils, abrasives, you name it. You generally know at least a bit about what’s in it. I can’t say everyone I’ve worked with wanted to know, but it’s often intrinsic to what you’re doing and why. You don’t just pull a random product off a shelf and use it. You choose it, quite often, because of its chemical composition. I suspect it’s not always thought of this way, though.

This is the same with a lot of artistic mediums as well. Ceramicists often know a lot more than you’d expect about what’s in their clay and glazes. It’s really cool.

I’m not trying to be contrarian here. I know some people don’t care at all, and some people use products because it’s what they were told to do and they just go with it. But that wasn’t my experience most of the time. Maybe I got lucky, haha.

In my country I think the vocational/trade degree -which might lie between HS and uni level- on car mechanics has basic physics, mechanics and maybe some chemistry.

Ditto for the rest of technical voc degrees.

If you think you can do IT without at least a trade degree on understanding the low level components interact, (and I'm not talking about CS level, concurrency with CSP, O-notation, linear+discrete algebra... but basic stuff such as networking protocols, basic SQL database normalizations, system administration, configuration, how the OS boots, how processes work -idle, active, waiting..., if you don't get that, you will be fired faster than anyone around.