The problem with "learned everything ourselves" is that you might have niche interests and you miss things. Things I learned that probably I wouldn't have by done by myself: computer architecture (memory, buses, cpu-s, instruction set), and related VHDL/Verilog; how complex is synchronization (implementing from scratch synchronization libraries); different programming paradigms (functional languages); compilers & operating systems (kernel modules, etc.); various types of maths (dsp); algorithm complexity analysis.

Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".

Edit: feel free to summarize this with an LLM it will be a ginormous comment.

That's a fair question and I'll do my best to answer this. It'll come in an edit. I think it's fair to say: not all courses were created equal in this regard but I'll do it course by course. I studied a bachelor information science but I tweaked my program so close to computer science that I almost daresay it's computer science (if I had 3 courses different, it was). I studied a bachelor in psychology. A two year master in computer science and a one year master called game studies (officially a specialization of information studies, but in practice it wasn't and it really was game studies as a whole field that we studied).

I'll try to do it in order per study program too.

AI-kaleidoscope: general overview of AI algo's. It's a shame we didn't know how to program or that we knew the usefulness of BFS or DFS but we learned it here. Not a useful course due to scaffolding issues (teach programming first).

Business mathematics: partial derivatives, etc.

Problem solving: useless course (teach programming first).

Privacy and security: we didn't learn much about security. We learned a thing or two about privacy. Should've been a TED talk, not a course.

Graph theory: graph visualization (and when not to do it, helped me out as a data analyst later), mathematical proofs, social networks (helped me to actually network a bit), graph algo's (made leetcode easier), not being scared of math notation. This was a really math heavy course as it was taught by someone that studied math in undergrad and grad and then switched to CS as his PhD (and by the time he taught it he was a full professor). He did not skip on the math which was wild since I was under the impression that I did a "business informatics" bachelor so I didn't need to have advanced math as a high school prerequisite. But I definitely needed that here so this course was hard.

Web technology: this was a bit too early but it was a good overview of web programming at the time. I remember being explained what the DOM was and I remember thinking "wtf is the point?" That was because they explained it way too theoretically and simply should've opened firebug or something to really show it.

Language of Logic and Methods of Reasoning: propositional logic and predicate logic. Practically speaking: after this course if statements are not a problem. This was true for me at least.

Pervasive computing: fun course but could've been a TED talk about how tech is used in interesting ways.

Introduction to programming: basic programming stuff in Java. I learned that Java is a terrible language to start programming in. I recommend JavaScript for app/web-oriented people and Python for "just pick a language" people. Nevertheless, while it was a terrible start, it did teach what it needed to teach which was a basic understanding, and skill, in programming.

Empirical methods: the better name is statistics 1. We learned about statistics and we had to program in R. Since our actual programming ability was quite weak it was a double course. It was the second language ever that I had to take seriously and it taught me a lot of programming stuff and statistics stuff at the same time. It helped that I had friends studying psychology at the time as that degree has a lot of stats in it, so I knew the lingo. Almost everyone else was hopelessly lost.

Programming project: no lectures, just one big programming assignment. After this it was expected that the student could write readable code. I failed this course the first time by a hair. And when I came back to it the second year I realized that I failed because my code was unreadable. So I refactored the whole thing and learned how to write much more readable code. We created the game engine for an Othello game. The graphics library was provided by the TA's. So we also learned to program with a library that was way beyond our heads at the time. And that also implicitly teaches you to trust certain abstractions.

Interactive multimedia project: we learned XIMPEL a hypermedia framework, kind of useless. But through XIMPEL we also learned about storyboarding, creating scenes and general video editing. This teacher was super hands off and allowed students to be creative. So I also learned to create simple PHP websites and learned my way around bash a bit. Then I decided to create an upload script where I used PHP to call the ftp command on bash. I thought it was impossible but it wasn't and had to rethink about what web applications could really do. None of these things were formal course requirements but this teacher encouraged this type of explorations so I do credit it to him that "I learned it in school". It's part of these efforts that he also gave me an amazingly high grade as my XIMPEL story graph was a bit meh but my creativity and extra explorations where a 10 out of 10 effort. So he gave me a 9 out of 10 in total. Also deepened my HTML/CSS knowledge.

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I'll write the rest later in another comment this is about the first year and I studied 9 of them. As you can see, I was just learning the basics here. But there are a few patterns:

* Some teachers allowed us to work on real stuff if the student chose to (e.g. Interactive Multimedia) and that got way more serious later on as I created an iPhone app for a client when the teacher taught Multimedia Authoring in the master.

* Some courses were quite useless or could've been condensed to a TED talk.

* Some courses taught something useful or semi-useful but it's not up to industry standard. But as you'll see, this will lead up to a level where - while not quite industry standard - makes the gap between industry standard and whatever I did small enough to just make the jump easily by simply applying what I thought was common sense.