Great article. Most students would probably prefer practical programming experience but they get CS degrees since that is all that is being offered at their college. The schools meanwhile couldn't care less about what's practical and they refuse to become a "trade school" so they instead require the students to learn difficult and often unnecessary material. Besides making it more difficult for the students who do succeed, it ends up scaring off many people from a career in software development all together. I think its time for some disruption in the education system...
I can't tell you how much I learned on the job vs. what I learned at school.
I don't think the difficulty barrier is the issue.
The issue is the code you write out of school. Your sense of style is driven by the fact that the TA would mark you off if you didn't write a comment before your function. Your experience working with other developers is confined to that one terrible semester long project with the one idiot and the other guy who wouldn't do anything until the week it was due.
I don't mind so much that I had to learn QuickSort every year for 6 years or so. I do mind that I left school not really grokking a thing about object oriented notation. I left school thinking objects were nice and they could have methods, and you could create other objects that got those objects for free - maybe some sort of polygon class with subclasses "square" and "triangle".
But in practical terms of course it was one huge main() function for most of the "hard" problems they had us solving.
I understand not wanting to be a "trade school". Computer science is harder than that. You want people who can understand big-O notation. But teach them how to code, even just a little bit.
