My point is that someone that has never worked professionally - that is, their experience consists of making a side scrolling game in their free time and debugging some javascript - doesn't have any useful experience for a corporate environment. There's a big difference between making a few little changes you want and making a few little changes someone else wants.
No, you're original point and the point to which story645 is speaking against was
Collaborating with others, sharing ideas, designing, working with customers, leveraging your position to gain resources, convincing management why you're right, scheduling, so on and so on.. you don't get that coding at home and you don't get that at school.
I have received extensive team building training during my schooling and have seen a real push for it to be a larger part of the curriculum in years to come. The absence of a company name and payroll doesn't make the experience any less useful in real world. But you're correct, if all I've done is make the 1902349038th pac-man clone in c++, i probably shouldn't be considered for the job any way.
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
