Re: the first paragraph--a lot of "formal CS education" focuses on systems and there are systems tracks. Where BSD came from, for example. So I wouldn't call it

Re: the first paragraph--a lot of "formal CS education" focuses on systems and there are systems tracks. Where BSD came from, for example. So I wouldn't call it useless (while the parts that do not focus on systems do, indeed, not focus on systems). In fact, even the non-systems stuff isn't entirely useless for systems--eg. how ideas from ML and Cyclone influence Rust and its application of those ideas to systems use cases. That said, all this is independently learnable, as is true for all things software.