handwave It's a tradeoff. What you may have atrophy a bit being out of academia for a little while is the jargon and some nuance stuff (i.e. can you still reas

handwave It's a tradeoff. What you may have atrophy a bit being out of academia for a little while is the jargon and some nuance stuff (i.e. can you still reason formally about big-O notation, do you still know the names and relative behavioral constraints on all the fundamental data structures, even the ones you personally haven't had to touch for a decade because your specific industrial domain hasn't really necessitated them---can't tell you the last time I coded my own hash function over just using whatever the default "map" / "dictionary" / "object" is in the language I'm using). What you will have an advantage on is the real-world stuff that an undergraduate new-grad may not have ever seen yet, like "How do you actually build a system that can move data from a web-based UI with authentication through to a database or backend-processing infrastructure and then back out to the user (and how do you scale out a system like that when it starts to bottleneck)", "How do you monitor and maintain a system after you've built it," and (probably the biggest gap between graduate-knowledge and real-world knowledge) "Cool algorithm; how do you verify it's right?" A surprising number of undergrad programs still don't teach unit, functional, or integration testing as a significant aspect of software engineering.