I think the liking math is important. Not from the standpoint of do you enjoy rigorously proving stuff, which would be required to be a serious mathematician. But, given a problem that is important to you, can you formulate the issues involved in solving it in a mathematical way. I claim, everything a computer does is math, it takes symbolic data of some sort, and performs some sort of operation on it. That is the essence of math. So you gotta be able to abstract things into some sort af mathematical like structure, and reason about the steps forward. Lacking that, you are just hacking, throwing out some code, and hoping it does what you want. Being able to solve complicated algebra without making typos and getting lost, is probably not so needed. But being able to formulate a plan, is important. I often write ten line programs to verify that my not too complicated math has been doen right. Combining computers with math, for purposes of verification, discovery, and yes to work out the details, when there are a lot of them, is the real key.