This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 05:47:40PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> The school I went to (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) at least tries to
> focus on the practical side of things (their motto is "learn by
> doing"), and when I went there, they even specifically had a Software
> Engineering degree where you had to take a year-long course where you
> did a project in a team for a company. But at least at the time, the
> big difference between the SE and CS degrees was that they required
> more classes with group work and fewer theoretical classes, and there
> certainly weren't any classes on something like debugging. The
> software engineering-centric classes focused more on a combination of
> teaching stuff like classic design patterns and then having you do
> projects in groups. And that was helpful, but it still didn't really
> prepare you for what you were going to be doing in your full-time job.
> It's still better than what a lot of schools do though. I'm frequently
> shocked by how little many CS graduates know when they first get out
> of school.
[...]

I suppose it depends on the school.  And yes, I've seen CS graduates who
have literally never written a program longer than 1 page.  I cannot
imagine what kind of shock they must have felt upon getting a job in the
industry and being faced, on their first day, with a 2 million LOC
codebase riddled with hacks, last-minute-rushed fixes, legacy code that
nobody understands anymore, inconsistent / non-existent documentation,
and being tasked with fixing a bug of unclear description and unknown
root cause which could be literally *anywhere* in those 2 million LOC.

I was lucky that I was spared of most of the shock due to having spent a
lot of time working on personal projects while at school, and thereby
picking up many practical debugging skills.


T

-- 
Real men don't take backups. They put their source on a public FTP-server and let the world mirror it. -- Linus Torvalds