alt Hacker News>Another common one is "I didn't learn anything in university" and all I can say about that is if you spent 3 years where your job was learning, and you didn't learn anything, then that's on you.
I don't think that's what people mean when they say that. They followed the curriculum and then when they started working they found they needed little of what they had studied and had a lot of gaps in their knowledge that needed to be filled.
That will always be the case though. No education is perfect, it will lag behind infustry standard because it takes time for the curriculum to catch up and industry standard still evolves rapidly.
I also think this view severely underestimates how much you actually end up using. For example you (are supposed to) learn at least one and more likely 2-3+ programming languages. We learned DSA which I very frequently see mentioned as "useless" which just tells me they never understood the topic to begin with. We learned about databases which I'd say most developers end up using. We learned about web development which sure if you go on to work on embedded systems or something you might not use it but it's a stretch to say it's useless.
I think the DSA example encapsulates a lot of this. Most people aren't top students who actually understand the topics, most people are mediocre and lazy. They learn barely enough to pass then they forget 90% of it and then they complain that it was a waste of time. Well duh. Of course it's a waste of time when you didn't actually learn it.
They go to uni just for the piece of paper and then complain that all they got was the piece of paper.