I take issue with the advice that you shouldnt study OS, compiler design, hardware design etc. If you take that out, you will never be one of the guys who did s

I take issue with the advice that you shouldnt study OS, compiler design, hardware design etc. If you take that out, you will never be one of the guys who did stuff like design the GFS, GWT, AWS and so on. You might become a good user of them but if you have any interest whatsoever in one day building cool infrastructure and solving really hard problems (as opposed to building throwing sheep apps), you may do very well studying these courses. Which problems you will ultimately solve as an engineer you cannot know. Better to have a knowledge of at least 3-4 tools. What you may think of "web development" may really turn out to be a compiler problem. Also see one of Steveys rants where he advocates learning compilers .. I dont necessarily agree with all his points but its still pretty decent. edit : Also its much easier to learn RoR or Django whatever on your own than in the univ. Its non-trivial though not impossible to learn compilers on your own.