Yes. Fortunately the only nail hit right on the head. Company is different from varsity. They aren't here for your skill development. Companies pay you to work whereas you pay the colleges to work towards your academic development. You are your own responsibility anyway.
> [...] look for SDE resumes from people with 20 to 30 years of experience. Well hey looky, they're mostly Fortran and Cobol experts, on IBM mainframes, and they've never done any web programming (or in fact anything you've even heard of before.) They don't even know Unix, which is only like 100 years old now, in dog years anyway.
People with 30 years experience are mostly doing C or C++, and some Java - if and only if they are still contributing. Most good ones are in technology leadership or owning their businesses & consultancies. Some of the ones I know personally (and still employed in dev teams) are extremely talented kernel engineers or project architects running a whole division in FAANGM-ish company. My eldest uncle worked in COBOL. That was late 60s - early 70s. (Still more than 30 years by 2005 timeline). By 2000 nearing his retirement, he was not making cool webapps, but making compilers better. In no way, irrelevant or a archaeological specimen. They were working on different class of problems belonging to different times utilizing their knowledge. It is fair to similarly wonder: "Why wasn't Steve Yegge doing anything about AR/VR in 2005 instead of writing this post". You had no idea AR/VR will be big 10 years later. By his own argument he would be an archaeological specimen today, unless he is making cool Oculus headsets
> Those folks, alas, are obsolete dinosaurs, and their programming knowledge is formally classified under "archaeology". They never pass our interviews, and they're becoming less and less able to find jobs.
I cannot find a more ridiculous statement in this rant post. Ever wonder why senior developers are paid higher in general than a college grad? Experience. That comes with time & handling scores of problems, over dozens of projects. You pay for their experience which they have accumulated over the years. If a process is filtering out well-rounded engineers, who have seen the contemporary shifts in computing, they aren't the ones in the red. The selection process is then flawed in choosing only currently hot skills. What kind of mistakes have such companies made? Wonder no more & read about internet companies that hired hotheaded college dropouts & highschoolers in the dot-com bubble.
Parting shots: Solving Leetcode/Hackerrank won't solve real engineering challenges.