> And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship.
I spent a good portion of my life in Universities -- and went as far as one can go in terms of educational credentials and taught at the university level -- and I cannot disagree more.
Universities produce job skills incidentally, if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse).
> We started with implementing simple data structures and algorithms and solving simple puzzles all the way to implementing toy OSes, databases, persistent data structures, compilers, CPUs, discrete simulations, machine learning models.
This was not my experience, nor is it what I have seen in most university graduates. It's still quite possible for a CS grad to get a degree having only theoretical knowledge in these topics, and no actual ability to write code.
This leaves open the question of where "the best place" is to learn as-practiced programming [2], but I tend to agree with the root commenter that the best programmers come up through a de facto apprenticeship system, even if most of them spend time in universities along the way.
[1] Their goal is to produce professors. You may not realize this if you only went as far as the undergraduate diploma, but that is mostly what academics know, and so it is what they teach. The difference between the "best" CS programs and the others is that they have some professors with actual industry experience, but even then, most of them are academics through and through.
[2] Code academies suck in their own ways.