This is largely because the beginning hours of work in any field--coding in general or some specialist programming--are remarkably inefficient. At the very star

This is largely because the beginning hours of work in any field--coding in general or some specialist programming--are remarkably inefficient. At the very start, everybody inevitably writes poor code slowly. It is more efficient to optimize the learning and try to get people productive quickly than trying to keep them productive throughout. All the undergrad courses--as far as I can tell--are just introductions to some field or other. Once you get to grad school--and some during undergrad too--you start doing research. This is productive while being didactic; however, I doubt it would be nearly as efficient without the useless classes before it. In short, while learning you're just solving known problems poorly (that compiler you wrote for your class was probably not comparable to GCC :). The stuff that actually needs to get done and the things you need to do while starting learning are unfortunately different.