> I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows.
I was a stil-at-school dev/sysadmin/multi-purpose nerd 23 years ago, if that works, nice to meet you!
I had more experience than average on some tasks because I was lucky enough that, against my own will, when I was a little kid my parents bought a computer and not a videogame console. I still spent most of my time in front of it playing games, of course, but I also learned to program a little bit, and by the time we had our first PC at home, I also learned troubleshooting because every time I broke it I had to get it working before one of my parents needed it.
Other than that, I think school prepared me well in terms of foundations (perhaps better than what some kids see today, at least I'm surprised how few people who went through formal CS/SWE university training recently know enough about the reasons the relational model was introduced, or how operating systems work).
On the other hand, practical skills taught at school were not immediately useful to me. In particular, the software stack most used at school (Pascal, then Delphi, we did have some courses using C, Prolog, ASM, COBOL, and SQL, but most of my programming hours in school were spent in Pascal/Delphi) was not used in any of the jobs I've had, with the exception of COBOL), so I did a lot of learning on the job.
I make a living working on databases now, and I sometimes like to tell the story of how I got into them: while working at a bank, the web banking application had an SQL Server backend database for its frontend (actual banking happened in another network, on a mainframe, I don't know which DB it used but it was some IBM thing and it was not DB/2). There was a settings table that was basically a key/value store controlling different config options of the app. One of them was a maintenance flag which, if set to whatever the value for true was, would show a "we're under maintenance" page when serving any user request. One day they asked me to go put the site on maintenance ("go put the site" because I had to go walk upstairs and enter the datacenter to do this back then), so I went to the console, opened the query editor, and entered something like:
update settings set value = 1;
Notice the lack of a where clause. When I saw the number of rows affected, I panicked, ran downstairs, explained what I had done, and a colleague (who was also young but I think at his second job after school, and way more experienced than me) calmed me down, walked up with me again, showed me where the backups where, and helped me restore one.
I've been hooked on databases since that day!