Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.

Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students.

I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market.

The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/

That's a flippant reply.

Programming is a practical skill, and its most common expression is industrial or commercial, not academic proofs of concept. The post addresses students who will enter industry; that's the focus of the professor's own post.

And I sympathize with many points being made here. However, the point of refactoring code is somewhat odd and detached from the real life constraints of programming in the wild.

Like, sure, in the ivory tower, you can confine yourself to nicely bounded problems and tidy little toy POCs. You can survive doing those things, because the selective pressures allow for it. I love those things, personally. They help me understand the nature of the thing. And in an academic settings, you can refine and refactor the hell out of those things to your heart's content (not that there is necessarily an objective end point to refactoring; code organization is subject to goals and constraints which can shift around).

But the reality of software in a commercial setting is not the tidy one you can expect in an academic setting. It's messy, subject to commercial pressures, to a hierarchy of values that doesn't place "refactoring" at the top of the list. And why would it? Whether you should refactor something is not just a question of whether it suits your conceptual tastes or even whether it is more maintainable. Unlike algorithms and principles and even techniques, software is not eternal. It is ephemeral. It's shelf-life is bounded. It is a piece of a larger business process. You're not refining some theory or some grasp of a Platonic ideal. You're mostly just putting into place plumbing to get something done. Whether you should refactor something, when you should refactor something, is a matter of prudential judgement, which is to say, of practical reason.

So, in light of that, there are actually quite absurd things to say given the difference between the privilege of academia and the gritty reality of industrial and commercial software development. If we were to force our professor into the world of industry, he would quickly lose his job or he would quickly learn that some of his strange idealism is silly and detached from the reality that his students will face.