At first I agreed with what you said, but then I realized that not only is it an elitist sentiment, it also misses the mark. I graduated from a university that

At first I agreed with what you said, but then I realized that not only is it an elitist sentiment, it also misses the mark. I graduated from a university that is known for its CS department. I can still remember most of the concepts that were introduced. I can also imagine that if you work with a narrow slice of that curriculum for 10 years after graduation, you might forget or get rusty on a good number of unused algorithms or ways of thinking. But I have also seen a lot of cases where different universities focus on different things in their curricula. For example, my university did not mention the phrase "functional programming", although that concept was well-known for over 15 years before my attendance. I was blissfully unaware of first-class functions. This is not new stuff, but several years after I graduated, I discovered it for the first time. And imagine my surprise and glee when I discovered over six years after my graduation first-class classes, multimethods (or generic methods), and the like. Suddenly, languages like C++ and Java -- which a lot of universities force-feed their students -- seem very restricting. Yet all this is fairly basic, just different ways to think about and approach our problems. The reality is that college can give you only so much, and you must accept that others coming from other colleges have been exposed to a different array of concepts and know about those more than you. You have to continue your career forward where the college left off. And it sure helps when a place like Hacker News can occasionally bring up these various subjects. On the one hand, it exposes different people to new ways of thinking, and on the other hand, it might encourage other readers to join the field. This stuff is old hat. But mentioning that and that you thought about it back in 1843 is a meaningless ego massage that, no, does not deserve sympathy. In a significant system, you cannot develop alone. Bring others up to your level, and learn from them, too.