Honestly, those two operators are the foundation of much of the logic in my code these days. They basically allow various non-linear behaviors to arise from linear numeric inputs, so you can use them to replace a lot of cumbersome branching conditional logic.
I've only been coding on and off for a handful of years myself, and not very regularly until the last year and a half, but I enjoy the problem solving and the freedom to approach things creatively. Guess it also helps that I'm very comfortable with math.