There's a lot of software being written in Excel macros and Wordpress web development. These tools actually get work done - they automate things that were not automated before, they publish things that were not published before, and they generate revenue and improve productivity.

Young coders, and the authors of these programs, should not be forced or expected to go through low-level programming classes to get work done. The tools are good enough and the hardware is fast enough that for 99.99% of all projects, they don't need this expertise.

I say this as someone with an EE degree (from less than a decade ago) consisting of classes that spanned the entire pyramid of complexity: from analysis and simulation of individual transistors, through construction of a CPU on an FPGA, through writing an RTOS for a microcontroller, up to programming a web server. That understanding benefits me greatly in what I'm doing today.

But I work with plenty of people who don't have that background. For all the business logic that seems to be found in any software project, that's just fine. Most of the work is in translating people's desire for the software to "do what I want" into actual requirements and then codifying those requirements into a database or UI. For construction of state machines, they should use a library or have someone more competent construct the framework and let them implement the actual states, and when the work requires an understanding of how microprocessor interrupts, they should defer to someone who understands that technology.

And yes, they should teach some version control in college as well. It would be enough to give students one major project that ends up with the filename laydn-Project-complete-final-actuallyfinal-3-done-8-29.zip, which just worked a minute ago after which you barely changed anything and now it's completely broken, and that thing that worked once stopped working at some unknown time in the past. Then just mention that git and svn are things that exist.