What I can say, from personal experience, is that the last time I interviewed college students for a programming job (this was five years ago), we had quite a f

What I can say, from personal experience, is that the last time I interviewed college students for a programming job (this was five years ago), we had quite a few applicants, but only one that had done anything on their own with their personal computer other than play games. It was startling. Only one had taken any initiative to write a single program that was not assigned homework. But, they could tell me quite a bit of details about the games they had played. Sad.