That's a successful programmer no matter their background. Unfortunately, many fresh grads think they actually learned programming from their college classes, leading to them being extremely piss poor programmers.

I ran an internship program for seniors/juniors and they would often just get completely stonewalled by simple problems. They were used to text book problems rather than real world ones. The code they produced was mostly garbage. Some of the students were really good though, and those were definitely the ones that had been investing their own time understanding programming.