I learned extremely few industry-applicable skills in a prestigious CS undergrad program. Instead, I picked up 99% of my useful knowledge from a few other places:
- One semester-long software development class, where the teacher did literally nothing while we formed small teams and worked on a project for a real client in or near our university
- Software engineering internship in the industry
- Extremely hard-ass Advanced Placement C.S. teacher in high-school
I learned a lot of cool theoretical stuff in college that is definitely good to know: functional programming, operating systems, machine learning techniques, compilers, graph algorithms, etc., but was never taught any core programming techniques or required to write very extensive code at any level of quality. It's all about real-world experience, if that's what you're shooting for.
- One semester-long software development class, where the teacher did literally nothing while we formed small teams and worked on a project for a real client in or near our university
- Software engineering internship in the industry
- Extremely hard-ass Advanced Placement C.S. teacher in high-school
I learned a lot of cool theoretical stuff in college that is definitely good to know: functional programming, operating systems, machine learning techniques, compilers, graph algorithms, etc., but was never taught any core programming techniques or required to write very extensive code at any level of quality. It's all about real-world experience, if that's what you're shooting for.