Having been self taught in both software and electrical engineering, I’ve experienced a lot of this.

In EE, it’s amazing how many graduates come into the job without ever having used Altium/KiCAD/Cadence for a nontrivial project or who can give you a very precise definition of impedance but don’t know how to break out an engineering calculator to set design rules for impedance controlled differential pairs. Or worse yet, people who can give you all the theory of switching model power supply but can’t read datasheets and select parts in practice.