I work with a ton of people from Grandes Ecoles and while I think they're generally great coders, certainly as much so as if they'd spent their whole education

I work with a ton of people from Grandes Ecoles and while I think they're generally great coders, certainly as much so as if they'd spent their whole education madly typing as fast as humanly possible, as juniors they're not much better than the "indent and write lots of comments" level. I've been to a "regular" university and I'm pretty sure I said some variant of "I write lots of comments" w/r/t my code maintenance approach in a very early interview. I could have written any algorithm you gave me -- but I had no idea what maintaining an application with users entailed. My experience is you can't really "teach" writing maintainable code beyond just having people fix bugs for 6 months in a million-line codebase that's reasonably well written.