Yeah, I don't know, I haven't see one in my experience so far. Anecdotal of course, but I don't think we have hard data on the subject, so who knows.
Sure, and I tried to be careful to caveat that in my original post. For example, I work in biotech designing imaging systems, backend systems to support them, and associated image analysis routines. When we hire pure computer vision people they are almost universally PhD's. It's a narrow, but very deep specialization and it takes years of research to become competent. Academia is where that research typically happens.
Pointers are an interesting subject to me because they are basic, not overly difficult to understand, but many devs don't have a clue and seemingly can't grasp the concept. People who 'get' pointers typically 'get' how a computer works at a more fundamental level. They have implemented lower level constructs, debugged harder problems, and have lived closer to the guts of their machine. Has little to do with pointers themselves, but spending a lot of time in e.g. C will teach you things that e.g. Java will not.
Having to think is not a problem. Joel Spolsky has a good write up on this which says it better than I can here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...vaschools.html
As for a 'walkthrough' for starting your career, well... no, not really. This is the real world where you need to make things happen for yourself. No one else really cares. My advice would remain the same; pursue a job while spending your free time building things relevant to your interests. Nothing will bring you up to speed faster than building stuff, and it will serve as a resume soon enough. No one can walk you through this, you have to set your own goals.