Sounds harsh, but knowing that Germans tend to be direct I wouldn't read too much into it. Also depends on the role. Universities teach programming from an angl

Sounds harsh, but knowing that Germans tend to be direct I wouldn't read too much into it. Also depends on the role. Universities teach programming from an angle which optimizes computation time over human time, even though that's rarely what industrial programming is about. For example, just recently I asked my professor can I reuse code which would achieve the required behavior in one line over creating a completely new approach. The professor asked me why would I want to do it inefficiently. I asked isnt it efficient to do it in one line rather than reimplementing the functionality. He said that you are technically wrong, but proceeded to show me how to do it nonetheless. In addition, the programming languages used to teach things are old. We are still given examples in Fortran and C is taught on freshman courses. The academic world is vastly different. For that reason, if I would personally apply for a software engineer role which is about web application development and I would be said that I need a degree for that, it would raise a red flag for me.