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where wonder ends
Aug. 30th, 2006 11:23 pmI come home and hop online, thinking there will be a world of content that has appeared since this morning. Unfortunately, I've been online all day at work, and in the 20 minutes it takes to walk home, not much happens.
I left the cyclical crunch times of school for the occasional crunch times of a startup. The assignments are different. They all have to work completely, and if they don't, you will sit there and fix them until they do. If you want more time, you have to fight for it. If a requirement is unclear, you have to talk about it. The code you write has to meet standards, and copying other designs is encouraged. Quality software engineering and documentation is equally important as working code. In other words, it's school backwards. And it's hard to quantify that as bad, as school assignments do an excellent job of exposing you to an enormous range of programming and architectural concepts, but they give little perspective as to how their application will play out.
Documentation is an oft-cited and excellent example. Docs are rarely expected (and sometimes discouraged!) in school assignments. But if you don't document your code at work, you will be fired, and your ex-co-workers will toast their newfound freedom from your shitty, unintelligible sludge. If you're bad at it, they may put up with you, but only if you improve.
While I was told these things in college, few assignments put it into action. I learned more about documentation from a one-quarter technical writing elective in community college than in 3 years in Western CS.
I complained extensively about this in my major review, but going out into the working world has made it clearer every day.
Mike V, one of my senior project teammates, had an interview with us today. He did very well, unfortunately he comes at an awkward time for us as the boss will be gone a lot for the next two weeks, and we're in the middle of a crunch for CTIA. I hope he doesn't find a better offer...
12 hours of coding today, and I gotta get off the keyboard and go to bed. Thank god it's no less than a mile between here and work.
I left the cyclical crunch times of school for the occasional crunch times of a startup. The assignments are different. They all have to work completely, and if they don't, you will sit there and fix them until they do. If you want more time, you have to fight for it. If a requirement is unclear, you have to talk about it. The code you write has to meet standards, and copying other designs is encouraged. Quality software engineering and documentation is equally important as working code. In other words, it's school backwards. And it's hard to quantify that as bad, as school assignments do an excellent job of exposing you to an enormous range of programming and architectural concepts, but they give little perspective as to how their application will play out.
Documentation is an oft-cited and excellent example. Docs are rarely expected (and sometimes discouraged!) in school assignments. But if you don't document your code at work, you will be fired, and your ex-co-workers will toast their newfound freedom from your shitty, unintelligible sludge. If you're bad at it, they may put up with you, but only if you improve.
While I was told these things in college, few assignments put it into action. I learned more about documentation from a one-quarter technical writing elective in community college than in 3 years in Western CS.
I complained extensively about this in my major review, but going out into the working world has made it clearer every day.
Mike V, one of my senior project teammates, had an interview with us today. He did very well, unfortunately he comes at an awkward time for us as the boss will be gone a lot for the next two weeks, and we're in the middle of a crunch for CTIA. I hope he doesn't find a better offer...
12 hours of coding today, and I gotta get off the keyboard and go to bed. Thank god it's no less than a mile between here and work.
