Jimbo

Not to knock too hard, but the part where your instructor was learning as he was teaching is a little... um... yeah. But you're probably correct in that you had as much (and perhaps even more) hand-on programming than the average university student. The main difference is that the university student has presumably had 2 years of theory classes that you likely didn't receive; this is an unfortunate trade-off, as many computer science programs tend to focus more on the science and less on the practice (perhaps rightfully so, but a 4 year program in "software development" is much harder to come across). The point my co-workers were trying to make, is that the theory is still often quite necessary to avoid architectural defects, but knowing how a language works is also important in preventing a lot of code defects.

[edit:] Jabo, did you cover any languages other than VB, C++, and Java? Just curious what was in the curriculum.

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Jabo

No, that was pretty much it. I did have a semester of DB development though.