It's also a skill that schools don't do a very good job of. Right now I'm TA'ing a C++ class and the sheer stupidity of some of the questions that I get asked

It's also a skill that schools don't do a very good job of. Right now I'm TA'ing a C++ class and the sheer stupidity of some of the questions that I get asked is ridiculous (I say stupidity, but it's really a mix of (1) some actual stupidity, (2) students not thinking for themselves, (3) students having no idea where to look and/or stuff was explained by hand-waving it away.) One thing we've done, for instance, is require that students submit their code via GitHub and make their code compile under both GCC and Clang on Travis. On the last assignment, the professor made a mistake when duplicating the Travis config file, so Travis kept trying to run a binary that wasn't there, because the new assignment had a different name for the compiled binary. The sheer number of emails and questions I got was absolutely ridiculous - and granted, I didn't blame the students for asking, because the entire toolchain side of things had sort of been hand-waved away from them, but the fix was literally replacing "./hw4-submission" with "./hw5-submission" in the Travis config. The point I'm getting at, I guess - because this isn't so much a thing about codebase architecture as knowing the tools you have to use - is that too much time is spent in the traditional CS education telling students to fill in code, or giving them frameworks and saying "make your thing work with this", instead of making them design stuff ground-up.