This article reflects my experience at University very well. I&#x27;m a self taught programmer that ended up pursuing a CompSci degree. I&#x27;m in the last semester of my BSc, and in hindsight I should have studied something else, like Physics or Electrical Engineering.<p>The standards are ridiculously low. Most of my coursemates (final year CS students) are literally unable to write software. They can write a single-file cpp file in Code::Blocks on a good day. In my experience (and having talked to plenty of other CompSci students, their experiences are similar to mine), formal education in programming is generally reduced to teaching students all about recursive functions, bubble sort and those kinds of things. There has been a grand total of 0 lectures or labs about unit testing, version control, API design, interoperability, etc. Let alone trying to communicate the idea of &quot;clear, maintainable&quot; code. Only a very small minority of people can write code, yet most of us will graduate.<p>I have a module called &quot;Software Quality and Process Management&quot; (formerly known as &quot;Large Scale Software Engineering&quot;. Good thing they changed the name, at least now it&#x27;s not such a blatant lie). In this module, we learn all about COCOMO, and how we should <i>estimate the number of lines of code</i> a project will use, and use that to figure out how many man-hours are required to complete it. <i></i>WTF<i></i>. I&#x27;m preaching to the choir here, but that&#x27;s like estimating the amount of effort it will take to design an airplane based on the number of grams of aluminium in it. When someone raises their hand and disagrees about the relationship between SLOC and person-hours (or even about whether person-hours is a reasonable unit - it&#x27;s not), the lecturer responds with a blanket &quot;you&#x27;re entitled to your own opinion&quot;, but draws blanks when asked about whether they know anyone who actually uses these methods in real world software engineering and finds them useful. It&#x27;s the same story when they teach about the waterfall development process and other similar outdated practices that are known to be detrimental to healthy software.<p>The vast majority of what I know about software engineering didn&#x27;t come from my time at University, and almost all of the software engineers I know have had a similar experience. I know correlation does not imply causation, but it&#x27;s definitely food for thought.