I disagree. The (quite old; it'd be interesting to see how this panned out) question came across to me as someone who, at the end of their many years in educat

I disagree. The (quite old; it'd be interesting to see how this panned out) question came across to me as someone who, at the end of their many years in education up to this point, has got very used to directed learning. They are used to learning by being set a challenge with some accompanying theory and completing the challenge. They may well be good at this and enjoy doing it, but they haven't become used to searching out the material for themselves. In fairness, for a corporate setting this may not be a great limitation! When you're working on someone else's project doing maintenance work as most developers end up doing, the need to seek out new problems and work out novel methods can come later; for now, your work domain is fairly closely controlled. We may well have a CS graduate without the passion to stick at development, but this isn't necessarily the case. I did very little personal work then, because I had other interests as well and was doing plenty of programming for my course, thank you. I think we've got someone with the self-awareness to realise their limitations but insufficient experience of learning outside of education to know how to address this.