Like… Literally any of it. I’m a software engineer and my degree didn’t have anything to do with software or engineering.
I’d have to really stretch to something like “time management” or “active listening” to find any connection, lol.
Computer Science was great dont get me wrong, but I totally agree. Comp Sci helped with some of the basics, but didnt prepare you at all on the soft skills that get you ahead, nor why task management, version control, and other such concepts are so important.
I can’t believe in my comp sci course they never went over git. Like cmon that’s core to software development these days.
It’s a little unfair to criticise a CS course for not being a SWE course. But I agree that graduating students in CS without having covered the basic requirements in the SWE day job most of them will move into is a disservice.
I did CS (30 years ago) and things entirely missing in the syllabus back then:
- any and all soft skills
- version control
- refactoring
- testing and the value of testing
- staging and replicated environments for raw dev, QA, live, etc
Totally agree! git is a standard for a reason.
It never fails too how many times I have to teach jr devs git right off the bat. Its just weird enough to require a little bit of handholding when they start.
Teaching about version control would be preferable to a singular tool. Git wasn’t always the #1 tool nor will it be forever, & there are some great tools pushing against Git as we speak which will be great for all of us when something truly better usurps—like Subversion, the former king. Training on a singular tool is like learning Microsoft Word instead of document processing where the broader concepts are more valuable for your career as you understand not just how but why.
Personally I had a lot of fun giving darcs & Pijul fair shakes in 2023 to understand what makes the patch theory cool to work with. You could probably do a whole course on VCSs & their models since you are correct that they are rather integral to real world teams & projects.
My comp sci course used SVN.
There was one tutor who used git on their course though, albeit via GitHub Classroom so that was probably more a convenience thing
It’s crazy that someone can go through college for comp sci and never touch things like VSC or PuTTY until they’re in the workforce.
Meanwhile a programming boot camp or IT Security Analyst boot camp will have you digging into the tools of the trade immediately.
Heh yeah. Lots of fresh grads don’t even really know anything about application development. Like they have a handful of sorting algorithms memorised and can explain what a compiler does (and are thinking about writing one some day) but can’t actually build anything.
Often, they can pick it up quickly, whatever the “it” is… But it doesn’t give them that much of a head start compared to someone who did a shorter program or self-taught.
I’ve never used PuTTY either, tbh… Is that just what Windows users use for SSH stuff?
Not anymore, it’s a terminal emulator but most have transitioned to just using Poweshell to SSH into things. I like multi-tabbed putty and use it heavily when configuring network appliances.
It’s also not a Windows thing lol you can install it natively in Debian, Fedora, and Arch that I know of with the basic package manager of each.
Oh lol TIL. I just read “PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform” on putty.org.
I wonder how many of the people I work with have used it before. Maybe I’m an outlier for never encountering it.
I’ve never used Linux in an Enterprise environment so I don’t know if there’s an easier way to store servers/switches as objects and access them via the standard terminal than MTPuTTY, but yeah I’m not surprised it was originally created for windows and then ported at some later time.
How did you become one? Every job description I’ve seen says it requires like a friggin doctorate or some shit. Lol.
You just apply anyway.
Usually they’re not willing to pay anywhere close to doctorate money for doctorates anyway, and will end up settling no matter who they pick.
I’m not sure if i’ve ever known any engineer who has met the listed job requirements for their role. They say requirements, but what they mean is “this is my ideal”. Put another way: think of it like a dating app profile. dude may act like he only dates 10s in his profile, but you show him some attention and suddenly you’re just as good as a 10, because he’s lonely and needs affection from someone.
Basically, for most companies, they’re essentially the corporate version of incels. Way too high of standards, but will settle for anyone who is into them regardless of what they think their standards are, because they just need someone ASAP, and their standards disappear quickly once you make yourself available.
I’ve enjoyed a 20+ year long career as a programmer, and I dropped out of college 3 months in because i couldn’t afford it. That’s because early in my career i took a few shitty jobs until i had a decent enough resume that i didn’t have to take shitty jobs anymore. That took study and practice and passion in programming, but i did that for fun years before i even showed up on the university doorstep.
I dunno, most of the job descriptions I see say something like “a relevant degree or equivalent experience…” And lots of places don’t even list an educational requirement, at least for more senior roles.
I basically self-taught while I was working in a different field, and then eventually found a bootcamp with a good alumni network and career placement services. Once you get a little bit of experience, it starts to snowball, but getting that first opportunity (or first few) can be a steep hill to climb.
Oh, and you gotta be pretty good at building software too, of course, but not as good as you’d think to get going-- Most of your learning is on the job, regardless of what educational path you take. In that respect, most go-getters with some diligence and aptitude can exceed the capabilities of a typical compsci grad inside of a year, I’d say.
There will always be employers who think the degree is really important, and there will be roles where it actually is… But plenty just want evidence that you can do the job well.
Same except i dropped out of college 3 months in and have enjoyed a healthy career for the last 20 years anyway.
How long it lasts. Year after year after year. No end in sight. No summer, winter or spring breaks. One vacation a year and a few sick days.
American? 🫤🫂
You get a yearly vacation and sick days?
Mostly the human factor in working in IT. It shows you have to manage systems and the larger concepts so that you can keep yourself up-to-date, but they don’t prepare you for how bad some people can be.
Meetings, managing email/chat, valuing the team over your personal grade where all shocks when I first started.
Most of it. I went to college for Funeral Directing. School will tell you it’s an ancient and honourable job of serving people in a time of need. 50% of school is learning “the art” of embalming and the other 50% is rules and regulations.
In real life, embalming is becoming a rare option, so most funeral homes have one or two directors on staff who can easily do every embalming the business gets. The other directors are essentially just salespeople. Most funeral homes are now owned by a few large corporations who don’t run it like an honourable service but rather like a used car lot. These corporations have found every trick to skirt regulations meant to protect consumers and drive up prices while lowering quality of service.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the consumers, who will take out their anger and frustrations on the overworked and underpaid funeral director who are not in on the take. Directors are typically paid for 40 hours a week but are required to take on all clients who call. It’s rare that a director can handle every client a week in just 40 hours. All places I worked were severely understaffed and burnout was incredibly common.
I eventually got burnt out myself and switched jobs. I would not recommend funeral directing to anyone. College acts like you’ll be treated like a doctor or lawyer but they must just mean the gruelling hours because funeral directors get none of the pay or respect.
Are people embalming less because cremation is increasing in popularity?
Yes. The places I worked had about 80% of clients choosing cremation. I assume it’s mostly a cost decision. Cremation does not require a casket or a cemetery plot, which are two very expensive items.
Even if I could afford it I’d feel bad taking up the land.
I agree, it always seemed selfish to me.
Office politics. I was a 4.0 student who was given an award by the faculty as best computer science student two years in a row. Despite being talented, extra hard working and driven, I had no idea how to play the game and my career stalled almost immediately. I watched others with weaker skills get promotions and raises because they knew the right people and served on the right committees. Being slightly autistic, I never realized the rules of the game. I quit after 8 years and started my own business, went back as a contractor getting 4x the pay, and it was awesome. There should be a class for people called “sucking up to management and gaming performance reviews.”
Yep, it is mostly apparent in big companies I would say. I could go on and on, but basically your work is so disconnected from the final output that what end up actually “mattering” is a bunch of made-up bullshit. Putting in quality work and improving your product/service does not benefit most of the people you interact with directly, unless of course you’re working on the popular thing that will get people promoted.
Anyways, I also left the corporate world to start my own business. Life is so much easier when all you need to care about is the quality of your work and not political points. I like my hard work to rewards me, and not just some guy spending his days in meetings claiming credit for “his” “initiatives”. Some of those folks would never survive a job that isn’t a mega corp paying them to improv all day in meetings.
Workplace bullies.
Worst thing is when you don’t even realise when its happening to you. My manager did and moved me to another team after a few months…
I now work elsewhere with much kinder and nicer people in a much smaller team 😁👍 but sadly the previous bullying has affected my life quite a bit, as well as how I interact with my partner.
I’m a filmmaker. Allllllllll of it. What I really needed to learn is that the name brand of the film school you went to will ABSOLUTELY have a huge bearing on how high you can climb. If your film school isn’t name brand, drop out and start working in the industry instead. I went to art school and learned all technical aspects of filmmaking. If I hadn’t actually worked on set while I was in school, I’d be absolutely clueless.
In the end, I have come to realize that it’s who you know.
Lesson: if you go to film school, at least make it a name brand like NYU, AFI, USC, etc or you will basically be a carnie because those rich kids look out for the kids they went to school with and NO ONE ELSE.
Office politics and networking.
The crushing pointlessness of it all.
How crappy leadership destroys culture and employee’s mental health.
All the meetings that either have no relation to your job or could’ve just been an email or text conversation.
Oh, college prepared me for that with unrelated classes that were requirements. And random other bullshit.
At least then I got the opportunity to learn something, even if it wasn’t ultimately useful.
How often my patience is tested by corporate platitudes and meaningless work.
Corporate “motivational” nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.
That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on “campus” (sigh), goat yoga… I can’t feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.
Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.
Drink the expensive/good stuff first is generally good, though. I’ll appreciate the good stuff more while I’m still sober/buzzed, and once I’m drunk the cheap stuff is easier to drink.
That assumes they’re having more than one drink. I took it a different way, basically don’t delay gratification you’ve earned.
The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I’m lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.
I basically double majored in international affairs and economics but ultimately became a software engineer. I actually think both my courses of study were valuable. I’m basically self-taught as a developer (though I had mentors) and other than Comp Sci or Physics, there’s probably no other majors I’d pick as a base.
For international relations, it’s just always good to know about diplomacy and history. We had courses where we studied successful negotiations. The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.
Econ is a good default major for a lot of fields. You learn to make statistical models and there’s strong math requirements with more of a focus on practical math than theoretical. (There’s even a little coding involved.) There’s classes on how businesses are run at a high level. Behavioral econ is helpful in small, but important ways (like designing little user interface nudges and prompts).
If I could redesign college, I’d make everyone in STEM majors do a minor in one of the humanities (and vise versa). We’d all be better off.
The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.
I’d argue that a lot of people have found Sun Tzu useful way outside of a military context, but also it’s useful IMO to see where force fails or succeeds, and not just militarily. I might argue (as just an armchair person) that hostile takeovers etc might have some analogs. Stuff like comparing how various empires handled integrating conquests might sort of apply to mergers (though maybe that’s not exactly military)… Even just the importance and limitations of morale in sprints etc.
