It’s partly about working in a professional environment. You can get a 4 year degree and never use git, never work on a single codebase that has existed long before you came and will exist long after you leave. There is so much experience from just working in a professional setting that can greatly boost your resume. We take caution hiring people without this experience as it can be impossible to teach this to someone when teaching them tech skills is easier.
agree for exactly the reasons above. the internship i did helped me understand so many things, from version control and unit testing to larger / longer-lived codebases, to the interpersonal dynamics of corporate settings... To this day I feel like I went through a relatively strong CS undergrad based on what I learned there vs. what my coworkers report having learned, but I also learned just as much via internships as I did in school.
