[shadowfiend]

It's true that the problem space of “accounting” seems, at least to me (I likewise don't have deep experience), somewhat more constrained; indeed, accounting seems very specialized. Perhaps one difficulty here is that “software engineer” isn't really one job or career---it's dozens of jobs or careers that we're pretending are one and the same. To follow the accounting example, I guarantee people are hiring software engineers to do work that is largely accounting. But they're doing that work in something other than Excel, so it's software engineering, not accounting. But is that actually true? You wrap these software engineers in teams with acceptance criteria, etc, etc, but really you're trying desperately to paper over the fact that your software engineers aren't accountants, and you're basically training accountants by trying to help the software engineers build an accounting system.

In general, I agree with your point. It's mentioned elsewhere that there's a difference between a trade school and a university, and a software engineering degree is a broad university degree. Much like an English degree won't guarantee you're a great author, it seems odd to expect a CS degree to guarantee you know how to handle an OOM error, for example. I think in many cases CS/SE degrees to themselves a disservice by trying to teach everything, instead of allowing specialization that can be clearly understood in the next phase of someone's career.