Dear junior programmers:
You will never get hired from what you learned at University

You have to study on your own, update your knowledge, practice at home and fail

The most important is to know which field to focus on

Don't presume that every university is the same, university is just a name. I guess some schools use it but don't really deserve it.

I knew nothing about programming and majored in Psychology. In 6 months my university taught me C++ which for me layed down all the foundation and understanding on which I could develop.

I am now a fulltime software developer with a nice career for two years, switched mostly to functional programming in Scala. While it is true I never program in C++ anymore I could never have gotten this far without fundamental knowledge taught to me at uni about what are variables in memory, pointers, strings / arrays, machine code / code compilation, and exercises with algorythm optimization.

Don't underestimate what (good) education can do for you. And yes, also network effects of school.

You get out of any program what you put into it. Some people just do the basics, some people constantly try new things.

I got a lot out of my education, and a lot from personal projects and work experience. Your mileage may vary.

What carp. I went to Uni with very little knowledge but came out knowing more than enough to get a epic Jr job which barely lasted a couple of months untl getting promoted.
One thing I wish non Uni types would go and learn would be acedemic subjects like project management, agile and document writing as they are key skills in today's businesses. I've yet to see someone self taught to know this when walking into a job, causing months worth of training and excessive time wasting.

I find that the job of the university is to teach one to seek information, give the ability to learn and in our biz, logical thinking and problem solving. Everything else on top of this is a plua and can be learnt while working.

*After Graduation*

Them: I will become an ENCODER in some company. I passed all of my majors, that shouldn't be a problem when they hire me.

Me: So much to learn ._.

The main outcome of three years of uni for me, was a better way of approaching all kinds of problems. I had to learn some obscure programming languages, partly developed by my teachers themselves, which meant most often that you cannot google for a solution but have to think really hard and solve it by yourself. In hindsight this is a really effective way, because then it is much easier to deal with new technologies. But I have to admit because of that, I had to teach me industry languages like Java, Ruby or JS myself.

Dear Junior Programmers reading this post;

OP is semi full of shit. Independent learning is very important, yes. But I learned a fuck-ton from my University about software development.

What you should also focus on is how to bridge the gap between business requirements and software, that will be your hardest challenge.

The less you learn in University courses the better, it will take less time to eradicate the bad practices they teach.

@PAKA I wouldn't have learned programming if I hadn't gone to uni, but there are definitely a ton of practices that goes on due to the "not part of this course" mentality.

Some of the starter code we got for various assignments were absolutely atrocious unreadable spaghetti that we assumed was just over our head due to coming from the professor and all. For years after finishing uni I thought the shorter and more compact my code was, the better. I figured crunching a big function up into one inline lambda that spans over 100 characters would be a more professional thing to do.

I got hired as a software dev right out of school with almost no experience and without a comp sci degree. So it can happen and it’s happened to several other people I know who were in the same IT Management program that I was in.