>the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.