> ...you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn

While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating.

Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.