alt Hacker NewsI went to a 2nd tier state school in the early mid 2000s.
For our senior project class, one group of students successfully incorporated as a startup and sold their project to the city as a SaSS app, and my group ended up open sourcing our cross platform app.
Everyone in the program could code - really well - by the time they got to their junior year. Those who couldn't were weeded out early on.
May have helped they the entire first 2 years were taught in native languages with manual memory management.
I started university in 2014 so it was post-Google-driving-up-engineer-salaries, and it attracted a LOT of people with no passion for computers, but wanted one of those well-paying jobs.
It was rare to find people who actually "got" computers, and learned things beyond what was taught in classes cause they just liked technology. Those of us who just really liked tinkering with our computers knew who the other ones like us were. And it still feels like that after working as a professional in the industry for the better part of a decade.
I'm pretty sure most of the people I work with have no idea what a .zshrc file is, or how to configure things to optimize their workflow, or use keyboard shortcuts, etc.