In software engineering schools in France, both in my personal experience and other Bac+5 people I’ve hired, the entire Bac+4 year was dedicated to group projects. When you have 8 group projects in parallel at any time, it does teach team work, management, quality control, all the good stuff.

After the first failed project, everyone agrees that they need a boss without assigned duties. Then in 5th year, we’d have one or two class-wide projects (20-30 people).

This, along with joining event-organizing charities on the campus, where you’d work 3-5hrs a week to build a hundred-thousand-to-a-million dollars event (NGOs on campus, or concerts, or a sports meeting, to each their preferences, but it was the culture). And it wasn’t always a good time together, it’s not flowers all the way down.

I’m only surprised some school might consider engineering without group effort. On the other hand, I deeply deeply regret spending this much time in charities and not enough dating, as I have never been recognized for charity service, and family was important to me.

Yeah. A fair bit of this is just “people working in teams” stuff, that people that buy into ‘developer exceptionalism’ will tell you is sacred software developer knowledge. It isn’t.

Software engineering isn’t just about teamwork, and not all software development-related teamwork skill is generalisable to other industries, but it’s far from uncommon for there to be some trendy blog post laying out the sorts of things that, yes, an MBA program will teach someone. Which is fine, if not for the fact that these same people will scoff at “clueless MBAs”.