[Clubber]

To me, those aren't really signs of growth, other than being able to take a punch.

1. Writing a professional product, from scratch to completion, by yourself or as a team lead, while doing every aspect of the project: BA, PM, design, architecture, server install, data model (if applicable), code, comments, documentation, QA, deployment, support.

2. Pick up a complete mess that someone else wrote, who is no longer available. Read it, really understand it, and be able to refactor it into something worth while.

As stated, most of the things the OP listed are really just academic and he should have done those in school, as they have been done as nausium. Rarely do you need to do those anymore.

[paulmooreparks]

To your last paragraph, I work with people with MS degrees in comp-sci who come to me, a drop-out, to ask questions about that stuff (data structures, algorithms, etc.). Sadly, not every school is up to the task of teaching these fundamentals. It seems that they're mostly teaching web development and Java Beans these days.

[Clubber]

That's unsettling. When I earned my MIS degree (with a bunch of CS courses) in 1997, you had the opportunity to get a great education, but you also had an opportunity to coast by. Back then, everything was done in "teams." You had people who took the bull by the horns, and you had people who were trying not to drown. C's get degrees, as we used to say.

Now, learning people with MS in CS have the same issues is what's really jarring. There were so many weed-out courses in BS CS, I couldn't imagine someone getting as far as a MS CS without knowing the basics.

Having said that, I earned most of my chops on "the street," with a great mentor many years ago. We really challenged each other want wanted to show each other how smart we were. Good times.

Do you know where they got their degree? ITT Tech or something?

[paulmooreparks]

I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were a fly-by-night sort of organisation like that.

In any case, the best developers I've worked with are the ones that practice the fundamentals on their own, regardless of whether they're degreed or not.