BASIC in school in 7th standard - 1999.

The thing is, I have had both kinds of college courses. Algorithm and DS classes would never place any emphasis on variable names, but software engineering courses would tell you how important all of that really is and the advantages. So in my opinion, its a little bit of both. Maybe they just don't know better and no one else has taken the time to explain to them the importance of this and it has been accepted by others. I have noticed that in senior engineers also. They would very rarely take the time and explain the importance of coding conventions and naming paradigms to juniors.

Couple of things I have noticed: Almost all focus on code and not enough on monitoring it once it reaches production. Lack of coding consistency and conventions and not enough emphasis on readability. Treating conventions as second class citizens in a distributed codebase where more than one person is going to contribute and maintain leads to a lot of confusion and hard to read code. Not able to understand the value add of good formatting, understandable variable names, class names which say what they are, method names which say what they do and do what they say. Over estimating or under estimating the amount of time it might take to finish something. Accruing tech debt while trying to finish work fast and never going back to fix it. Hardcoding of DB urls, passwords, thread counts, message strings (in case of UI).