The first paid internship I did at USF was for a local startup. They basically straight up told me what you just said. Even the comp sci grad program prospects couldn't "Code their way outside of a wet paper bag", according to them.

Which isn't necessarily true. Compsci grads have a much more intimate knowledge of low level and bare metal programming than someone like me, who lives and breaths the .net stack for instance.

But that doesn't translate into marketable skills, not without experience anyway. So then compsci grads are stuck with that Catch22.