Hmmm ... It is entirely possible that the EE's went straight out of that maths tutorial and into an electronics class that used complex numbers for a practical application.
To be honest all us software engineers understood that we didn't make up the majority of maths students. I would have been perfectly happy to hear about how I could have used complex numbers to design circuits or build bridges. But I guess the maths classes were designed to provide the pure theoretical foundations upon which other, more subject specific classes would build. It just so happens that for software engineering there were no subject specific classes which made use of the maths.
To be honest all us software engineers understood that we didn't make up the majority of maths students. I would have been perfectly happy to hear about how I could have used complex numbers to design circuits or build bridges. But I guess the maths classes were designed to provide the pure theoretical foundations upon which other, more subject specific classes would build. It just so happens that for software engineering there were no subject specific classes which made use of the maths.