At least they didn't treat you to a two-week-long PowerPoint presentation.

...on the previous version of the system.

...the month before the training was updated to the most recently fielded version.

...taught by a retired Army guy.

...from Texas.

...who won't stop telling stories about his Army days.

Hey, what's wrong with Texas?

You ever notice how most people never tell you what state they're from unless you ask them? It's almost like they don't believe their state of origin to be all that important to their personal identity. Some of those people might even be from Texas.

But the hombre from Texas is not one of those people. He will drive for 30 minutes, past dozens of ordinary, mundane restaurants, to reach the nearest Texas-style barbecue restaurant, run by a fellow expatriate Texan, who shoulders the burden of living outside of Texas for the sake of fellow Texans who tragically cannot be in the best state all the time, yet need to regularly consume bits of Texas in order to survive.

Ironically, Texas has so many people in it, all constantly surrounded on all sides by Texas, that you cannot easily identify that guy until he actually leaves the state.

Also, the thing that's wrong with Texas is football. That is easily 120% of my problem with Texas.

Well, if it's any consolation, right now all their college football programs suck, and suck hard.

It was in fact possible to go straight to a Master’s in Software Engineering.

Oxford’s distance Master’s will take experience in place of a degree.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/

Is it still possible somewhere, somehow?

Yes, the programme is still open, and will be for tyhe foreseeable future.

How many classes did you take in college? Because my first few CS classes I didn't learn a whole lot from either. It wasn't really until the 200 and 300 level classes that I started learning anything substantial that I hadn't picked up on my own beforehand.

I only have a couple classes left. I had already studied it all before starting, materials up to graduate level are mostly available openly online now. I did expect more from the 300-400 level classes and lost a lot of motivation when I realized they were not as advanced as I expected.

I did take some 400 level electives completely outside what I am interested in and had not studied which were great though. One professor for those asked in the beginning what each person expected from and I mentioned what I am actually specializing in and he consistently gave examples of applying it to what I do which was excellent.

If waiting for 2-3 years before you're able to learn anything substantial is considered normal - and we're not talking about monasteries and such - then I think there is something seriously wrong with the system.

I was already writing various types of software, taken a class in high school, gone to summer camps, etc, before I reached freshman year of college. There was plenty of students who had never even touched a programming language before and it was all brand new to them.

And I still learned things my first year (especially in ancillary classes, I only took three computer classes my freshman year), I just didn't get much out of CS classes until sophomore year. One of those classes was a gimme class I really should have tested out of ahead of time in hindsight, though (basically computers 101, I had quizzes on identifying what was the desktop, mouse and monitor).

You should read all the context before stating that this comment thread means the system is broken. Just because extremely self-motivated individuals now have readily available resources to learn almost anything on their own does not mean the system is broken for everyone else.