Why are people surprised? Taking all the coursework in Math, Programming, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Security and Cryptography, Distributed Systems, Databases, etc., and also learning and internalizing all that knowledge is a significant time investment. Yet many people here would be offended at the idea that you can't be a proper engineer without a CS degree, and would insist that all you need is a three-month JS/Angular bootcamp and then you're golden. A formal CS degree in itself may not be a requirement, but the time investment in acquiring the knowledge sure is.

I can speak of based on the ~100 interviews I conducted hiring SDEs. There are very few who could pass an SRE I/II interview, yet I know of few.

What's the pass/fail rate for sde though? If you interview 100 and 10 pass through to sde, and 2 of those could do sre, that's not actually that bad.

Because Bachelor's degrees don't give you a serious knowledge of or experience in anything, they give you shallow knowledge of and experience in a broad array of topics.

This is just not true. Engineers in many disciplines other than CS (mechanical, electrical, civil, etc) begin serious professional work with only a bachelors degree.

> other than CS

This is simply not true as well. CS majors also can begin serious work with just a BS degree. I have no idea what school(s) the parent topic is refering to but remind me not to recommend people go there...

Four years is a LOT of time to get deep on multiple CS topics not just a broad overview. If you finish 4 years of serious study and don't have deep knowledge of a few things you did college wrong.

College is the only time in your adult life where your only job is to learn. It is incredible that many of us get that opportunity and that some people come out of it with just broad knowledge is disappointing.

In my CS program, senior and most of junior year were almost entirely specialized courses where we had a choice to pick a topic that interests us and deep dive. (AI, graphics, networking, bioinformatics, big data, programming language theory, etc). All the general studies were mostly done by the end of sophomore year.

That's great. The "CS grad who doesn't actually know how to write production software" is a well-trod trope, but hopefully it is less true than it used to be.

You are absolutely wrong in those examples. Those fields are so broad that there is not time to specialized in college. They only learn the fundamentals.

You could have two identical ME grads go on to specialize in completely different things. One guy might spend his entire career working on hypoid gear sets and another might work exclusively on marine diesel rotating assemblies.

Ditto for EE, CE and so on.

How it runs in the ideal case is different from experience in how it "actually" runs and fails. That's the biggest gap IMHO.