8 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

You really dont understend what is semester project in university.(Or in North America it mean something other). For example one of semester works in my first semester has involve development of a desktop window framework from scratch as subtask that has been required to visualise anything else. And each of 9 semesters we has a 2 semester works for different fields.

We had semester projects like that - my fourth year operating systems course was the development of an operating system. That was about the largest project I think I worked on in university. It was small. I also wrote a game engine for my final graphics project. I don't have the code in front of me, but it was probably around 5000 lines. It felt big to my undergrad self, but nowadays I work on codebases that are hundreds of thousands of lines and everything I did in university is puny by comparison. I would consider any program that can be done in a month by one person, that is less than 20,000 lines of code, and is not maintained after submission, to be too small to learn the skills I'm talking about. A codebase is "medium sized" in my mind if it is over 50,000 lines. And I could count on one hand the number of courses that I did in my bachelors years that used C or C++. 

Real codebases last years and are worked on by dozens of people over those years.

From what I hear from people who did graduate degrees, most of the programming they did is equally small projects, and what's worse, they only existed for the sake of one paper and weren't maintained at all after the paper is submitted. Contrast this with industry needs - programs that are maintained and updated and even rewritten over the course of decades. Masters students also don't tend to use C or C++ all that much. In fact, they probably use those languages even less unless they're specializing in something systems related.

I did a "co-operative education" program where I spent 16 months of my degree actually working as a programmer in the game industry and I learned more from that experience than years of university had taught me.

9 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Really with Specialist degree (same Tier 7 as Master in North America) and 20+ years of expirience in many fields of development i has spend couple years to get in math required for serious engine development.

The skills I'm talking about that are missing from university educations aren't math skills. They're the "soft skills" - experience with the idioms and development practices of the industry and how to deal with teams bigger than 5 people and how to deal with non-technical clients... You can teach the surface layer of those - I learned about unit testing in my undergrad, for instance - but there's just so much stuff to it that there isn't time to teach everything a person needs.

Also, at least where and when I went to school, C++ teaching was sorely lacking because of the common perception that C++ is being phased out in favour of managed languages. None of my courses that used C++ even covered templates. Perhaps that's different now.

8 minutes ago, Vilem Otte said:

From experience, I have to disagree with @Oberon_Command - universities often tend to participate in research, and be as state of the art as possible.

State of the art when it comes to things like graphics and deep learning research, sure - but judging by my own experience plus all the interview experiences I've been hearing about from my coworkers who interview junior devs, definitely not state of the art when it comes to software engineering or modern C++.

8 minutes ago, Vilem Otte said:

In addition most of the people who did master's (or beyond) actually worked either for some company, or had contracts which required them to actually work with the code - most of them work either in the software industry now, or started their own company in software industry. The ones that weren't coding in addition (to help them solve problems, to earn some money on side or to get more experience ... whatever was the motivation), they simply don't work in the industry at all.

Most grad students I've known went into grad school straight from their undergrads, with no actual work experience in their field. I have no doubt that for some of them it was an attempt to dodge the "real world" for as long as they could.  Perhaps it's different in Europe.

Ok I'll throw my 2 cents in. I don't have a degree but I have a lot of experience. I have always been able to find a job but still sometimes I wish I had the degree.  Not necessarily because I would learn anything new, I do that all the time on my own, but just because people look at my resume and kind of go WTF ?!?! I worked for a long time at a MAJOR semi-conductor company as an engineer and they are kind of not sure what to think about me.  Some companies won't even consider you without a degree, or they think maybe you aren't really that good. I sometimes even now think about trying to get some sort of base level programming degree.

To the OP I would say go for it!  You don't have to have the uber-degree but I think just having something is a good idea. You will probably learn something too. I've actually helped a couple friends get degrees. In some cases I wrote whole final projects for them.  It was actually quite educational for me.  At one point I learned X64 ASM. Another time I learned some stuff about prime numbers and encoding. Some of the stuff I actually think I can use in my game work, so I don't look at it as wasted time.

8 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

It just a illusion. Really most likely university has give you anything that required to understand it expirience. By other words it about impossible to get it expirience without knowledges earned in university.

Really i gues my 1-st year of work as junior into FA departament has give me more expirience than 5 years of University and 3 years of work as lead programmer in Accounting departament while studing. But without University studied theories it just impossible to understand ever what same FA system that i worked with do, not saying about how it do it.  

Okay, I can agree with this story, as you present it - but the claim I'm specifically taking issue with is that 5 years of university will make you into a "god-level" programmer. It won't. It takes university (or equivalent studying) and work experience to become a genuinely good developer. Some people are quite bright and quite dedicated and can get the equivalent base without the formal degree, but one still needs to get the base somehow.