I'm not the original poster, but I'll share my opinion. As an undergrad I took two semesters of software engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (CSC 308 and 309), and as a grad student I was a TA for a year-long senior-level software engineering sequence at UC Santa Cruz (CMPS 115, 116, and 117), which culminated in a capstone project. In these courses we were taught formal software engineering methodologies, with an emphasis on iterative development (at UCSC we taught our students Scrum). However, at the companies I've worked for, which include a mixture of traditional, conservative companies (such as an aerospace company, an "old-school" Silicon Valley enterprise giant, and a traditional Japanese IT company) and large Web giants (like Google and Facebook), the software engineering processes I've encountered in industry have been much more informal.

Granted, at both Cal Poly and UC Santa Cruz we learned very useful skills that are very important when writing production software, such as source control, code reviewing, coming up with effective testing strategies, and other things that I use in my career daily. However, we learned other things that I haven't encountered in industry yet, such as writing formal requirements documents and drawing UML diagrams.

Learning it ~15 yrs ago and then never using it again.

Anecdata.

UML is pretty retarded.

Hey look. Let’s make system documentation easy by drawing a bunch of stick figure people.

Stickman is a bank customer.

And he needs to

1. Open an account

2. Deposit funds

3. Withdraw funds

4. Close an account

Seriously?

I mean this is from the time when Waterfall was a thing and the "best practice" was let's design the entire system specs upfront and then build it..