I knew multiple people in my CS program that didn't even own a computer and never did anything computer-related outside of class. It was just a job to them. We could never understand it.
Almost everything I learned about writing code came outside of class, mostly messing around with open-source tools and games.
I see people coming in with 2 year degrees from community colleges, who can outgun 4-year CS graduates. The ones who can pull this off tend to be genuine hackers, who have a passion for what they are doing.
A little perspective from a junior in EECS at MIT who is also concerned about leaving college as a competent software engineer.
In most software jobs, practical experience outweighs theoretical knowledge. I would guess that the people from 2 year degrees spend a lot of their time actually programming, whereas those with the 4 year CS spend a lot of their time learning about computer science.
At MIT and there is really only one software design class you need to take for a CS degree. It is expected that to learn to program you need to do it by hacking around on your own or working at software companies during the summer.
I've found that there is a significant group of CS majors at MIT (myself included) that are more interested in the cool things that can come out of theory (and eventually programming those things) than in programming itself.
I would be bored out of my mind gluing libraries together to write a chat program, for example. While I find the process of designing/building/tinkering with anything exciting and fun, I am simply not that interested in chat programs. I'm not even that interested in computers! To me, the freedom to explore my interests related to computing and computer science, without being pigeonholed into a "standard" computer science curriculum is fantastic.
Hence, I've spent more of my time learning about interesting topics in computer science and math than I've actually spent coding. And I've spent even less time designing software (as opposed to just coding on various simulations/algorithms/mini-projects).
To echo what someone else said, yes, genuine hackers my age will probably code circles around me when it comes to programming. But we're probably not even interested in the same kinds of jobs.
I am not saying software engineering is not important -- it's simply taking me longer to become competent at it (or at least "employable") because I'm trying to combine it with other interests.
