Working for any company can be compared to well anything, any number of analogies can be formed, but for me, I’ll geek out with one about programming. I find myself after 10+ hour days thinking in code and dreaming in code, a strange paradigm as my conversations seem to remind me of programming solutions I discovered earlier in the day. Regardless of my entrenchment in code and my increasing disdain for the web build I still appreciate looking at life through php.net or whatever it may be.
Working at a new company is like learning a new language. All you do is adjust you skills to a new syntax. Apply everything you already know to a new set of rules and get on with it. Along the way you find yourself grateful for built in functions and syntax shortcuts, but find shortcoming around every corner. Where Perl kicks ass at parsing, PHP kicks balls at its support, frameworks and with 5 all the OOP additions. So what I am getting at is colleges are like those predefined functions and the new syntax is like an unfamiliar process (if it exists) that you have to get used to.