I wrote this in April 2018 about IT education. It was controversial then. In 2025 it's just obvious.
IT academia is a vulture of the intellectual world.
The people best qualified to teach technology have zero interest in academia — they're too busy building companies, shipping products, and changing the world. What's left in the lecture halls are people teaching things that won't be relevant by graduation.
Seven years later
This is more true than ever. University CS curricula can't keep up with a field that reinvents itself every 6 months. The best engineers learned by building, not by sitting in a lecture about design patterns from 2005.
The real classroom is the codebase. The real professor is the deadline.
The gap has only widened. In 2018, a CS graduate was maybe two years behind industry. In 2025, they're graduating into a world that looks nothing like what they studied. The frameworks changed, the paradigms shifted, and the tools they spent four years learning are being replaced by AI-assisted workflows they've never touched.
The people thriving aren't the ones with the best degrees. They're the ones who shipped something real, broke it, fixed it, and shipped again. The lecture hall can't teach that rhythm. Only the arena can.