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Search - "good teachers"
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I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!
I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.
Whats with that attitude?
I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".
Actually, that time is never.
Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.
If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).
In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.
You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.14 -
A request to all of you posting these feel-good rants about your past teachers.
Maybe shoot them a message to tell them how much you appreciated them, teaching is a very rough and thankless job for the most part.
It's funny how much it meant to some of my past teachers...4 -
My first software teacher almost made me quit programming for life.
She spent the entire year not showing us how to make a shity app in visual basic. Zero help. We all hated it.
At the end of the year and she realised she had 'forgotten' to teach us 70% of the course. We all failed miserably! I didn't touch programming for almost 3 years. (unless you could MATLAB, which I don't).
That was when I discovered Mehran Sahami's CS106A course on the Stanford website. Honestly the best teacher I've never met! His passion is boundless and mastery of teaching is second to none. Thanks to him I discovered programming and I love it! Karol the robot should get a special mention too!
Good teachers make the world of difference.6 -
I've been doing programming as a hobby since I was 10 years old, I've always found my teachers are good at IT but not that good in Computer Science and programming, this year a new teacher joined the IT department who has actual experience in programming etc.
Our school uses two services, a rewards system which for some reason can also show our timetable, and another service for displaying our homework. In my spare time I made a project which combined these two services and showed it to him. As the first teacher with actual programming experience he was impressed and now I get to 'pitch' my project to the teachers higher up.
TLDR; It's good to have a good teacher -
I was a good programmer.
My teachers always impressed by work..
I was like coming up on my own solutions not from books. Never remembered any algo but still the one who solve mostly every problems
Well then..
joined companies after college.
I thought I will learn so many new things..
Yes i learned but I'm feeling like I'm losing the spirit of problem solving
I'm just doing same thing, same logic, making similar kind of application with just little difference.
Nothing is like i'm making something new... All I'm doing is using predefined java and android method..
To create some predefined designs and working.
Fucking similar client requirements.
Seems like time to quit job and dedicate myself toward research
I know it's a boring rant... I'm just fucking
*frustrated*
For some
Hope hope = new Hope() ;15 -
My words to live by...
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++9 -
Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...
Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.
Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.
But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...
My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100
So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...
So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell
Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations4 -
I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.
1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.
2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.
3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.
4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.
5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.
I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).4 -
Okay so this is going to be a rant.
My exams started last wednesday. I'm doing a study called Application Development and I'm in my 5th year now (out of 4, long story).
This is the stuff that's going wrong at the moment and it's getting FUCKING annoying.
- The windows computers were not installed that well so everyone had to downgrade from the last update which took way too long.
- We have to have at least 1-3 conversations with the 'client' and 'manager' for each document but the waiting lists are so long that we have to wait for about 2-4 hours in general (we had a total of 18 hours for the first task) so a lot of people couldn't even have a meeting about around half of the documentation. Having meetings about everything is a REQUIREMENT for a good grade.
- Some of the teachers are so slow that the meetings take way too long.
- Although documentation is important, we calculated that about 80% of the WHOLE FUCKING EXAMS will be documentation which is way too fucking much.
- Some of the grading points (like chapters you have to write in the documentation) ARE NOT EVEN IN THE TEMPLATES MY STUDY PROVIDES. Already had a moment where a teacher was like 'I'm missing this chapter?' me: 'It's not in the official templates?!?' teacher: 'stop right there. I have to grade you for this so is that your or my problem'? unbe-fucking-lievable.
- Some students get so many 'musts' that we are seriously doubting if we can get this to work within about 2 days (12 hours).
Sorry for this rant but I had to get this the FUCK out.8 -
It was the time of the 90s when one created HTML with frames. During an HTML exam we had 1 hour to create a website with 3 frames. Top, left, main. Some aligned random images and some formatted text. Kind of boring, I know. So I finished early and handed in my diskette with my homepage. To make it easy for him I added my name and class to the title.
When we got our grades I was in for a surprise since I had expected a good grade. I asked him why I didn't get a good grade. He kind of shouted at me that my task was perfectly done but I shouldn't have written my name in the title but name and address of this school. It is not a really dramatic thing but I always hated when teachers quietly assumed stuff and didn't tell us. And then handed out bad graded for totally unrelated stuff.3 -
Why the fuck do teachers take points off for coding style. Like really placing my open house brace on the same line as an if is what looks good TO ME. And breaking from a while loop with an inverted condition is nicer than a huge if TO ME. Fuck it I like the m_ for member variables too. And yes C++ usually names functions like someFunction, but I like how c# does SomeFunction. Like shit, it's personal I don't care that I lose 5points every test I do it just to say fuck you21
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Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.
So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).
So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.
Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.
So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.
Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?
Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.
Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.
So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.
Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.25 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.15 -
Had a final year project defence today in university. There were about 15 CS teachers in the room.
Our project was "Crypto Currency". After all the presentation was finish.
Teachers: so what is this blockchain?
** explained all about it and how it works with marker in a whiteboard **
While most of the projects were rejected and they have asked several cross questions to other friends, they didnt even ask any question to us and said our project is accepted.
Turns out teachers were taught by a student today, feels so good 😎 😂4 -
I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.
Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.
Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.
He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)
But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done
Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.
How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.
Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.13 -
Found out that my physics teacher uses duckduckgo.
I already liked him because he has one of the nicest personality off all teachers I met( and he has a good humor too)
But now I like him even more.3 -
I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.
This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)
As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.
One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊
I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.
The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.
But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.
The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.
I havent met anyone like him ever again.
Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.
It's been lonely. ☹2 -
Started showing my brother some deep learning tutorials and I have him reading a book.
I really need for him to realize how smart he is. He was never academically inclined. I always told my mother that it had to do with the same dislike of school that I always had and how a couple of really shitty teachers could run one's motivation to the ground.
I always found him brilliant. Had a good standing with common sense amd logical thinking. He was interested in math for a while(same as me) but school made him hate it. He managed to pass all the state exams needed to graduate from H.S and was able to succesfully pass the military ASVAB with a very good grade.
But after H.S he went down the drain with what he wanted to do.
I love my brother and really want him to find out just how smart I think he is and this would probably be one of my biggest experiments with him. Maybe, just maybe if I get him to realize that he can understand these advanced concepts without a teacher his(fear?) Of school might go away enough for him to give it a second go. Fuck man I don't even need for him to go and get a B.S in comp sci, an associate degree would be just fine. It can be on anything, I just want him to do something.
Sometimes I feel as if this was my fault. At one point he told me that he feels shadowed by my grades. And my family was always proud of what I did in H.S and at uni. I feel(sometimes) that I should have paid more attention to him as he was going to school, help out a little more and encourage him more.
He feels as if he is meant for a dead end miserable working life, and I really can't bear the idea of him wasting himself away to something like that.
I really hope this shit works man...i really need for this to work, he doesn't even need to like it, just realize that it is possible.8 -
FUCK LINUX
now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…
god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.
I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.9 -
Hello everyone,
I am a french student and I was wondering if college sucks everywhere ...
This is my third college year and I have the feeling that I am wasting my time.
I am in a quite good engineering school but most of the programming courses suck because «teachers» are clueless about the course that they give.
I am not here to tell that «I am better than them blabla» but I just wanted to know if the quality of education has slightly dropped not only in France.
I am really interested in your opinion, feel free to debate in the comments :)21 -
Okay so this happened ages ago (nearly five years) but this suddenly came to my mind again.
It was in the first year of my study (currently in my 5th and last year).
I was experimenting around with php and mysql during some free hours. All the insert,delete and so on statements worked perfectly find except for one update statement. Started to debug of course and after a little while of no results I was like "oh yeah right, something like logs exists of course". Looked in the logs but nothing. No matter how I altered my code (rewrote it numerous times for some 'clean starts') it just would not run the update statement.
Alright, time for some class mate help. After multiple hours of debugging with a few classmates, there was still no result at all.
Time to bring in one or more teachers. After hours of debugging, still no result even with the help of a few good teachers.
Decided to give it a rest for that day.
Two weeks later it still was not updating anything/working and I finally gave up.
Till today, I still have no clue what went wrong and it still bugs me from time to time :/4 -
If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong ~ House MD
Tl;Dr : I'm pissing the right people off and my God I like it
That's what I've known and have confirmed doing my current side project with my gf, we are working on a ratemyprofessors clone with extra spicy features, one in particular is so spicy some teachers will be put in a position in which they would rather grind hot peppers with their butt cheeks.
Don't get me wrong, there are good teachers (some of which actually showed support) but some are not good teachers and some aren't good people either; I've decided it's time to stop complaining and take action.
We recently released an alpha and I presented it to a teacher I had this semester (one of the "not so great" kind) as a DB proyect cuz fuck it I'm not doing 2 projects.
This teacher is your run of the mill "I'm lazy and I don't care" teacher and she ran the classroom like a shitty kindergarten, so much so, one of the teams was presenting a buggy admin site as their project and she started talking on the phone! Right up on their faces!!
My turn, I go up and handle her a 30 page printed thesis of my project and said that unlike my mates, I was going to start presenting the idea and then the actual software...why is it printed?, She said; Because I won't be projecting the PDF ma'am, I actually made a professional presentation and that way you can read more technical details while I give a broad overview...
I started talking about the huge issues students face and my research about it, undisciplined teachers, no class structure ~ abrupt interruption ~ "yeah I know like, you are giving so much statistics and numbahs but where is the database?"
I got pissed off because the whole purpose of printing and giving her the docs was for her to ask specific questions AT THE END! So I told her I was getting there and to ask questions at the end...I start showing off the system's sweetest features... everyone got quiet...a girl on the front row kept looking at the teacher and then back to the board with her eyes wide open, the teacher was visibly upset.
I asked someone to please help me by using the site being projected for everyone to see, he searched the teacher's name and it obviously popped up cuz I scrapped the whole teacher index site... some people gasp and others start murmuring.
She freaked and started arguing saying that frontend can't be just HTML and CSS, where did you mentioned x and y feature? admit it's just teacher evaluations! where did you get the teacher names? I want the scripts!....it went on even 10 minutes after class and the next class with a police like interrogation.
So yeah, something tells me I'm not getting an A, but I'm happy after all because that's the kind of reaction I want from those types of professors.
Worth it 😎8 -
One of my theoretical CS teachers always complains and makes it sound like everything around him is an annoyance to his existence
- being late or in a bad mood? His pregnant wife is very tiring (good ol' haha women are hormonal much?)
- having to create and correct exercises for us (students) is a nuisance because it's so much work and we're not supposed to be spoon-fed (which makes the whole learning experience very demotivating)
- every explanation start is continued by at least 3 changes in the explanation itself, which makes everything super-confusing
- all his helpers are incompetent and not rising up to his expectations
Someone needs some self-reflection2 -
OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻♂️
OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.
OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.
In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.
Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.
But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!
I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...
Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.
I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)9 -
School sucks.
Paying quiet a lot of money(not having that much) to a private school that used to impress me two years ago.
Now I can see all the hidden crap:
- Project work is graded after written lines
- "Do this project with scrum" Got two hours in the room with scrum board in a whole semester
- Exams are pushed if the teacher is to lazy to deal with bad results. A 3 ( or C ) became best grade.
- They could not find a teacher for OS & Networks. So instead of 1 semester Server architecture we got 5 days.. 1 of them for exam (exam = final grade)
- Guy took part with us during the 5 days. "How did you do that?!? Doesn't work on my PC I think" - half year later he is the new Network teacher
- Surpassingly he sucks at that, being half a week ahead of his lessons by googling shit together. Can't answer a single question beyond that..
Once he created a multiple choice exam. Questions in a word document online, answers on paper. Not just that he never blocked the internet during the exam, he also publicly uploaded the document a week ahead. Securing it with a 5 letter password... Somehow we all passed that one with a pretty good average.
Besides there a some teachers who are actually really good.3 -
Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?17
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Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.
BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.
So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.
My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.
I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.
After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?
I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.
And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.
Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?
Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.
Just so done.7 -
I have this one chick on Twitter that she used to be a fellow classmate of mine while I was going for my Bachelors degree.
She would always bitch and complain about how the teachers we had were horrible at teaching. I had to interact with her because of one assignment and EVERYONE in the team was good and well with the items, we finished it rather quick (build a terminal emulator) and we were just thinking about ways to make it look cooler. It was challenging to be honest, but everyone was so interested in it and had all the materials requires plus a very nice instructor to go with that would be overly happy to answer questions and provide additional content, the instructor in question made no book requirement for the class and provided instead free resources, be it video content or his own code on the matter to make sure that everyone got it.
Dude was amazing (most of my university instructors were truly fascinating or people that had worked for very interesting projects) and so when she complain that the guy "had no idea how to teach" I decided to investigate a little.
You see, she had NEVER taken any consideration that maybe you should advance your studies in the field, particularly in programming, by doing your own fucking research. No, the professor is not supposed to hold your fucking hand while you are trying to understand how a fucking function IN FUCKING PYTHON works, dude gave a full length lecture and the only retard that did not understood the topic: was you. He went to you to help you and instead you gave the man an attitude because for some fucking reason he was accounted for your own fucking stupidity. Motherfucker was there for more than 30 minutes trying to explain to this dumb chick the nuances of def hello(): return "hey there" and for some fucking reason you were too daft to understand that.......
The chick complained to us in the team how because of work she had NO time whatsoever to dedicate to reading programming or general software engineering materials......yet her twitter was FULL of book reviews concerning novels and self help books and bullshit like that.
If you are like that, and blame it on your teachers: fuck-you.
To this day she still bitches about the teachers from time to time, I legit told her once that she had no business attending a C.S degree.
Do you think you can get into Julliard without ever touching a fucking instrument? no. Do you think you can tell some Terence Fletcher-throwing-a-chair-at-your motherfucker to show you how to position your hands on a drumstick or what keys to press on a piano? FUCK NO.
If you were being DAFT on a ProGraMmiNg101 for which they picked Python to be the language to use and blamed your fucking stupidity to a teacher then yet again: FUCK-YOU6 -
!rant - Story:
I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!
Finally! I've had a though time.
After kindergarten kids went to primary school while I had to go to a place called "Vorschule". Kids with disabilities go there. I, for one, was not physically disabled. I was psychologically disabled.
My German was not that good. My native language is Turkish. I had to spend 1 or 2 years there, before I was able to attend the primary school like the normal kids.
In the primary school a few teachers started making racist comments. I didn't really understand them, but my father did. After 2 years of attending that school, I switched to another primary school and continued with everything there.
In the secondary school (comprehensive school) I got bullied a lot. I was getting racist comments on a daily basis. Even by some teachers. Whereas some other teachers were showing it indirectly.
In the same school a teacher made me get a bad grade in one subject on purpose. Thus I got a bad certificate. Not the certificate I deserved.
I spent a year in economics after the secondary school. I was in a vocational school. I didn't like it, because I wasn't really interested in economics.
"Why did you choose that then?" you might ask. That's a legitimate question.
I didn't get accepted in anything related to informatics.
Anyways, I got bullied there, too. Physically beaten by trouble makers in my class and mentally by a french teacher.
He told me that I will not be able to get my certification that allows me to attend a university after me telling him that I will change the school and try it again in informatics. Several times.
I was in the new vocational school after that one. It was very stressful.
I, again, got bullied there. But this time not by the kids, but by some abusive teachers and directors.
One of them was a racist moron. My ex-PE teacher. He someday told me that I won't be able to achieve anything in my life.
I was always naive and kind of let all these words destroy my future plans in my head, but I had a little bit of hope nonetheless.
Today, I got a letter in which it was written that I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!
Omg! I'm so fucking happy! I could explode! (A lil racist pun)17 -
Rant PART 2 [FINAL-inspirational]
In my previous rant I posted what was happening in my life. And now I want to share how it all unfolded.
To remember some things, I was doing a mobile project for school and it was a group assignment. My group was so disperse that I ended up doing all by myself. And in the middle of this my gf and I were fighting.
I spent the last two days coding all day during work (I do coding internship for the college I go to, so my boss was cool about me doing the project during work) and I ended up forgetting what day it was today (today is a holyday, I thought I had to go to work because I forgot). It was such an intense two days that while coding I was forgetting variable names, table row names (I literally spent half an hour on my API trying to find a solution, when the solution was that I was using `seller_fk` on the API, but in the database was `seller_id`) and my mind was imploding. I asked my boss for help on the database (he's really good at it) and my teachers to help me. But everything paid off.
Yesterday I started coding at 8am and ended up finishing the project at 9:28 pm (the day before yesterday was the same thing), 2 minutes before the class of the project to start! I was able to finish the project, finally! But what really remarked me was that from all the groups that were in like 4-5 people, I was the only one who delivered the project that day. All other groups are going to have to deliver the project next week with reduced project grade, while I got 100% of the grade because I delivered on the date.
God is good!
Also my gf and I are good now. We are kinda still recovering emotionally, but are now more respectfull to each other, so I guess something good can comeout of bad things.
Happy coding everyone and never give up!
If I made it out of this whole mess so can you! :)1 -
We had robotics, or rather an electronics workshop today. Just imagine throwing a bunch of nerds into a room with 3d printers, lots of electronic parts and other tools.
Anyway one of my friends said that his computer wasn't working.
Me: It's running windows so it's broken by default.
Him: common, windows isn't that bad
Me: it is
Our teacher walking by: I'd never want to use windows, it's basically malware
I just sat there smiling 😊2 -
oh many, not that I need them for my ego. Shit is large enough as it is, but four in particular:
Had two interns that told me that they had learn more from me in two weeks than they did from their progamming teachers the entire time they were in school, that I had a really good way of teaching and that I had restored their interest and faith in the world of software development.
My 60+ year old CTO that used to work in the financial sector as a developer way back in the day and then with heaven knows how many other tools tell me that I was on the top of his list for the best developers he has ever seen. Considering that I am 28 it meant a lot to me.
Also my previous manager currently living in a big city telling me that I completely outclass every other developer she works with over there.
My ex boss before working at my current institution telling one of our contractors that it was going to be damn near impossible to find a developer of my caliber. That I had set the bar far too high.
Shit is pretty cool man.20 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
The best teacher that I've had is one of the teachers at my university lab.
He teaches Data Structures. We had some programming assignments and I was good at it, but whatever I'd do, he'd always find bugs, ask me to resolve it and he'd always give me challenges in the lab which is fun in the lab environment. University labs usually sticks to the sylabbus. I actually learned alot from that experience..
'Trail and Error is the best method to learn programming.'2 -
Bring the fun and curiosity back.
School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.
First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.
There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.
I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.
What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.
Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.
The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".
When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.3 -
First day of the academic year(CS):
(some uni official) - "And remember to become a good programmer you have to become an excellent mathematician first"
(Me): Oh shit.
Little did I know...
It is a second year now. And the only course I failed is the one that he lectured.
I had no fucking idea that people like this (mad)man exist.
Almost at every lecture he was introducing at leas one topic that was way beyond our program; as he thought they were interesting and "fun".
Many teachers at the University refered to him as a very 'ambitious' man. Then I didn't blame him he truly loved his profession and wanted to share as much knowledge as possible(I thought).
But two months ago he went to far. It was a second exam(for those who failed the first one). And believe me there were a few(60 out of 160 to be exact).
Only ~30 people showed up as the rest failed to many courses and would be kicked out of the uni anyway.
He was handing out the exams when I saw that whoever gets one slowly starts turning white.
I finally got my copy and immediately I realized that the tasks are from his favorite topics, the "fun" ones. 🤦
At this point I knew that it will be extremely hard to pass. But when I was reevaluating my life choices something draw my attention.
One of the tasks had a note below it: "Homework after the exam: It is a very interesting problem just assume x instead of y and try to solve it. PS: it is a lot of fun!"
At this point I lost it.😠 I don't care how much you love math, you should always assume that not everyone loves it as much as you do. So don't push it down the throat of people who clearly don't need a degree in this subject!
Now I'm preparing for the second semester with this guy. And I have a strong feeling that it will be hell of a ride... again.😐
BTW: Sorry that the rant is so long, it's the first one I wrote, and had to share it with someone 😀18 -
So my laptop is a Lenovo y50-70 and it's quite good. The keyboard is amazing compared to most other Laptops I've tried the screen is nice, it's durable and it's got some decent specs. With it (and also my desktop) I dual boot Kubuntu and Windows 10.
About three years ago I decided I wanted to reinstall both OS' since they were starting to get cluggered. Lo and behold I wasn't able to do that because, and I quote: "EFI USB Device boot failed".
Hours were spent trying to Google different things to the point where I was even desperate enough to go beyond page 0 on the different searches with (as you might have guessed), no luck. "Fuck that" I thought. It worked and I could clean it manually anyway.
Fast forward to the last part of August this year where I upgraded my Kubuntu from 17.10 to 18.04 and shit got weird. You can read more about it here:
https://reddit.com/r/kde/...
but the TL;DR is in the link. Windows was also quite annoing as well (but don't take my word for it).
As you might understand it made me really frustrated. I couldn't update my BIOS since they were already at the current version, but one way or another I had to fix it. After a while was almost about to give up when I decided to give this:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/...
a go. It was weird though. Like imagine the conversation:
"Can't boot from USB bro, what do I do?"
"Just update your kernel, bro"
Well IT. FUCKING. WORKED.
So I imideatly installed Linux and have just now bothered installing Windows (since all of the teachers are vacation so I had plenty of time to set it all up).
But got damn.4 -
To long to read. So don’t do it.
I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.
The world more or less looks like that :
Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.
Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.
If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.
Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.
At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.
All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.
If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.
If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.
Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.
I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?
That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.24 -
tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.
Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';
First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.
After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.
We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.
In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.
The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.
We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.
We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.
After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.
A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.
We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:
"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."
That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.
Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.1 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Some have good teachers and do some good work.
The main problem for me is their false promises. There is no scarcity of junior developers. None.
Anyone can be a programmer doesn't mean that everyone can be a good one.
The first 2-3 years will be very complicated.2 -
# school suck
! coding
hello, hope im not bothering anyone with my adolescent problems, but im really angry towards school.
first of all,
the subjects get thaught much too slow.
like dafuq, why does our maths teacher need 6h to teach us what square roots are? Why does our history teacher need 10h to teach us about one single revolution???
and worst of all: why is everything accompagnied by long, repetitive, homework?
Also, why do they think that im bad just because i dont have the best grades??? im a GOOD average, without learning a TAD!!!
also, here i am, needing to learn maths for some it project.
when i ask any teacher, he doesnt explain it to me but says "you will learn that in class xy"
ok, then i guess i can teach it myself.
but when i take books into school to read em (remember, i already know the subjects), the teachers always take em from me.
also, im not allowed to talk to anyone. not even when idle.
so currently, i am trying not to get angry from this, tomorrow school starts again. after this year legally, i would be allowed to drop out.
could you please tell me what you would do? should i drop out? change school? change class? im open to reolly anything that possibly could help (my parents arent)35 -
First thing, give the schools enough money to buy proper IT equipment and hire at least one person who does IT full-time per school so that the CS teachers or whoever runs the school's IT infrastructure doesn't have to worry about it at all times.
(Hopefully, the ban on cooperation here in Germany will be lifted and the federal government will be able to subsidy all schools at least financially in that aspect.)
Then, educate all the teachers, for fuck's sake.
It is sad to see an otherwise good teacher in a technical subject at a technical college struggle with the basics. Teachers should have continuing education in computer science and also should be comfortable working with technology.
There are some good CS teachers and some who're also nerds but they can't fix everything nor educate every colleague. Unpaid and in their free time, mind you.
Then, update the learning materials for CS. I've seen/worked with some of what is used in schools today and it's definitively not worth the money but it has to be bought anyway. At best, education materials should be open-source so knowledge can grow and be updated more quickly.
Also, don't rely too much on big cooperations just but cause they offer you shiny materials and discounts. -
I feel guilty for using YouTube Vanced and being unable to support content creators.
Shouldn't there be a feature that allows you to toggle ads on certain channels you want to support?
I really want to support such folks who are creating valuable educational content but Google being the biggest piece of corporate shit, makes me angry when it comes to compensating the creators fairly when they make Billions off their hard work.
The world is a better place because of such teachers who spend time, energy, and efforts to create valuable and useful content for rest of the world.
Funnily, back in days when we had awesome stuff, the tech was shit to document all of it. Now when we have advanced and easily accessible tech, we have shitty TikToks.
Why can't the creators of good content get more visibility and why is the world so fucked?16 -
Hello, my name is Adam, I'm from Poland.
As a 16 year old dude I thought it would be a great idea to go to an IT focused highschool so I'd get my degree after finishing school but guess what- I completely fucked up.
First, there were the little things, like the teachers favoring other students that already knew stuff, which was okay and all- the problem began when Poziomka appreared (one of our PC service teachers). That motherfucker almost fluked me because of dumb shit like the PC's we worked on took forever to boot, so he's just go and give people F's, "Why?" you may ask- well because "It was obviously the student that made the PC run so slowely".
There were a few more incidents like when we were disassembling and assembling those dumb HP Compaq's PC's on time- and that fucker gave me an F because it took about 10 minutes to boot by itself.
That shit got me so demotivated its unreal, soon I found myself in a pretty dark spot, with my parents divorcing, my whore mother taking all the money- me not finding any reason to do anything in school and the cycle looped.
I'm not gonna pull the depression card here, but what I'm generally trying to say is that although I'm not "awful" at IT in general, so PC assembly, networking, programming (fuck that, I'm fucking awful at it), HTML, I still find it difficult to do anything right.
I have a question, how do I get myself back up? Any ideas?
There's so much material I've gone through in the last three years- and I just wanna make sure to get good- somehow.
I'm just a talentless dumbass kid who just wants to know how to do linux, programming and such, but I don't know where or how to start anymore.
If anyone has any stories where they turned their life around and managed to do IT right- please, tell me how you did it, I just wanna know is there a proper way of doing it.
- Adam13 -
I once failed a subject during my masters (complex analytics and measure theory).
Next year I decided to give it everything I've got. I had grown to love it and could solve most problems they threw at me. Hand written an 80 pages long "book" distilled from all the notes, proofs and visualisations from all the lectures that year.
I only exerted this effort (even though I could've just "passed" this subject) because the lecturer was so damn enthusiastic about maths. Even though he wasn't a CS teacher this course was my best experience of a teacher at uni. He loved the beauty of the maths he was teaching and managed to make me love it too.
He was a maths geek and when I aced my final he told me he actually writes code too. He showed me some simulations he wrote while he worked on some theoretical nuclear physics stuff, because that's what he was into. Really cool guy. I wish more CS lecturers were as good teachers.1 -
Once again, I have to go with the guy that, after seeing my horrible (I can't highlight this enough) code, decided that even I wasn't hopeless, and went on teaching me the basics of software engineering, top-down design and unit testing. All of this in two days, but it gave me the motivation to work on it, and look at me now: I'm a devRanter :')
-
I am gonna toot my own horn a little in here and say that the best mentorship experience I've had comes from me being the mentor.
I have trained interns at work, and they both said that I was able to teach them more than all their programming teachers combined. I was a TA at uni and got the same remarks and i help friends in their uni level courses at a local uni all the time. The remarks are always the same.
I like teaching. And don't know why some people hate it so much yet still decide to take in a paycheck. I want this industry to get better, I want my city to get better(because I loathe it) and I really get a good feeling from seeing other people succeed and be happy.
I really want to teach. Thinking about getting more years under my belt, earn a master's degree and then I would really want to teach professionally.
My biggest issue, here in the U.S education is ridiculously expensive. Teachers that don't give their best and yet make that paycheck are a disgrace to our industry. I want to show passion to others and if possible transfer a lil bit of it.
I just want to teach man. Already work at a school and I want to make that transition one of these days.3 -
Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :
1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .
2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.
3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)
4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"
( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )
5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)
And there were many other short stories like that.
Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)
But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.
Bloody Office politics :| -
Of course, I just swiped the wrong way on my fucking laptop trackpad and list everything I just typed. FUCKING MARVELOUS.
TL;DR: Teacher stopped me from being productive. Principal almost called cops on me. Nearly threw chair at librarian.
So I'm at school yesterday, and we have a presenter in 2nd hour, so naturally, I'm gonna be on my computer doing things for other classes at the same time. Efficiency. Teacher doesn't like it, I refuse to put the computer away telling her that I'll be more productive and still pay attention, which HAS BEEN PROVEN MIND YOU, but she ends up calling security on me and I get sent down to the principal's office.
I talk to him, and he says 'Yeah, I know it's in the way, but you have to follow the directive given by the teachers.' Fine, fuck it. Won't go to her class for third hour. (I have her twice in a row for two different classes.) Next day.
I walk in, asking her if she's gonna do the same thing she did yesterday, hoping that she realized her error and will fix it, but no. She says I STILL can't have the computer out. I'm sorry, do you not realize I have 6 other fucking classes, most of which are required to graduate, unlike YOURS, as well as a FUCKING COLLEGE CLASS TONIGHT?! She gives the ultimatum. 'Obey or leave.' Fine, I'll leave. I go to the principal's office again, he must have a stick up his ass or something today because he's not budging. We argue for a while and he gives a WORSE ultimatum: 'Obey, Go to the Library, In House Suspension, or I'll call the police.' What the actual FUCK MAN?! You're gonna call the POLICE on a NONVIOLENT STUDENT?! Are you fucking MAD? I keep trying to tell him that there's an easy solution to this, but as he's getting up to call the cops, I say 'Fine! I'll go to the library!' He follows me over to make sure I don't kill anyone on the way.
I slam the door to the library open, and when I walk in, the librarian is there at her computer, and she asks 'Where are you coming from?' 'Principal!' 'I need a pass-' 'Well, I'm sorry, I can't exactly get anything for you right now, I was just sent down here.' She says 'Either way, I need some kind of note or pas-' 'Listen, I'm not in the mood for any of this right now. Please, just leave me be.' She then tries to say something, but I cut her off quickly, 'Just back off and leave me alone right now. The more you push it, the more you're gonna make me want to throw this chair!' Imagine the volume just gradually getting louder on that last one. She quickly runs out and talks to the security desk or something, which is right outside the library door, but she's the only one who comes in, thankfully. I was expecting to be fucking dragged out for no good reason. I'm loud, not violent. I have no history of violence.
So yeah. Here I am in the school library, angrily tapping away at my keyboard, trying not to throw the entire table to the fucking moon. All because this broken-ass public school system has no idea how to deviate from the norm when it's actually productive and efficient to do so. And now, the obligatory:
FUCKING PIECES OF SHIT WHY DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG IN EVERY SINGLE THING YOU ARE DOING YOU IDIOTIC SCUM-FILLED MEAT SACKS OF NO FORSEEABLE VALUE! FUCK!1 -
This is a sad story of bad recruitment in my school.
One day I had my computer class in school and my teacher was on leave so the substitution department sent another teacher to our class.
I have 3 computer teachers in my institution, let us assume their names for this rant as A, B and C.
A - The most learned teacher who has a lot of experience and also writes books. This teacher is the head of the department and wants students to explore coding.
B - A teacher who sticks to books and writes books on Excel and Powerpoint for small children.
C - The youngest teacher who has almost no experience at all.
What happened was that during the substitution, teacher C was sitting and doing her own work. I thought she might know java and other fundamentals of computers. One of my friends asked her about some bug in his program. She went to his seat and said that teacher A would come and help you out. To this, the student said ok.
I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.
A few months later teacher B and A were talking about some coding competition and I was alone in the lab cause I am the only one in 11th with computer science.
The problem here was that C came to the room and quietly asked what is an object and class in java. I was shocked! I mean how could that happen, she is supposed to know everything in the comp sci syllabus. This was a disaster, teacher A was explaining to her about classes and objects. It was clear to me that she didn't know anything about programming in Java.
This is the fault of our school.
My school wants a good rank in the lists and for that they cut down the budget of teachers and remove old, experienced teachers for cheap, newer teachers.
This was shocking as a person who doesn't know much about something can't answer the doubts of children, this is a wrong way of teaching.
Hope you have a good day :)7 -
I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.
Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.
Anyways, wall of text is over.
Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <31 -
I've been feeling very bad because I don't think I've been making good use of my free time. So I decided to change.
Looked at my goals, first in line, getting a driver license.
For that, I need to arrange times for practice with my dad.
For that, I need a clean timetable. I had one but teachers are lame and don't respect the times of course.
So, I need to print the new one I already had done.
So I went to the printer.
And it prints awful, everything is pink because it doesn't print yellow.
Fine, let's change the cartridge.
Printer refuses to work, it throws a stuck paper error.
My dad tries to fix it putting fingers inside. Nothing.
We suspect it's the new cartridge, change the new cartridge chip with the one the old one had. Printer fooled.
It still doesn't work. Stuck paper.
My dad admits he felt he broke something when he reached inside the printer..
We had to disassemble it and fix the broken part.
Now it works again.
It still doesn't print yellow.
We'll have get it fixed or get a new one.
I guess I have to draw my timetable by hand...
Sucks, I made it using html and flex. Every 1fr was 5'.
I'll make a gist if anyone is curious about it.1 -
Most of us have scary stories about professors that think that they know about what they are talking about when it comes to teaching comp sci subjects. Shit is so backwards in most parts of the world with teachers showing outdated or completely pointless tech.
A friend called me the other day asking for classic ASP help because it was being used in his web class. Another was asking me about flipping c cgi web scripting. Wtf are schools teaching? Having the drive to LEARN actuall useful topics that are relevant on the market is hard enough as it is...shouldn't schools help at least a little bit? I was lucky, we were thaught Java, Python, cpp, js, sql, html5, css3, php, ruby and we had classes for node (for those interested) and asp.net mvc. Those were RELEVANT and good classes and while some outdated tech was good the rest is just bullshit. Specially since most teachers have 0 market value as develpers...but hey!! Wtf do I know! Of course my word is shit against all them doctorate and master degrees.
Gimme a break. School can be great. But a lot of the leadership there is toxic af for our industry. And while I appreciate the effort in me being thaught modern languages (and thaught is a hard word since I already knew how to program way before going to school) i still remember a teacher taking points away from an assignment for not using switch statements in Python...despite my explaining that there was no such thing (you can go around it by using a lil technique using functions, its pretty cool..pero no mames)
Or what about the time I mentioned to a fellow student how he could use markup for having more control with his windows forms while the very same teacher contradicted me saying that shit was not possible. Or the guy at the school in which I work teaching intro to programming using fucking vba...fk man if you are going the BASIC route at least teach them b4j or something fuuuuck.
I had good teachers, but they were always cast asside by dptmnt heads as if they knew better. I just hate pendejo teachers I really do.
Chinguen a su madre, bola de babosos.rant remembering uni yes asshole gnu linux is a viable alternative i still love coding fuck bad teachers fk the system11 -
I had many good teachers and mentors in the years but one was far most the best. He was a CS Math teacher and hat this flame 🔥 for math and teaching. It was literally affecting everyone in class. He took his time to get everyone on the same level. While some would do better then others all would succeed. What made him special were many little tricks. He would let us all sit together after every topic and test and discuss what each found easy or hard. Everyone would get his time and he would never tolerate offending behavior. After a year we were all grown together helping each other get through the exams. It was kind of magical.
I told him this and he was in fact really happy to hear that. When we meet nowadays we get some drinks and talk about hobbies and stuff. -
Fuck C!
It sucks so badly!
Our College Teachers are Teaching this to us in the first year.
I know many of you will disagree with this.
But I like Python as I am digging into ML/AI and for this domain Python is powerful. I am trying to practice in C language but still, it sucks badly as sometimes I can't even figure out what is the error even after debugging or looking on StackOverflow. Anyways this is a good programming language because of Low TLE and versatility.
Anyways this was my thought. No offense.
This is Devrant so I Typed my frustration.35 -
Today was a rather funny day in school. School starts for me at 13:40 because our timetable planners are so qualified for this job.
First 2hrs: Physics, fine its good
Second 2hrs: Discrete Maths (however you want to call it)
Goal is to write a text (30 pages, 10, etc all those standard settings). Teacher prefers Latex over word, but we can do it in word if we want. We could choose a topic, I took primes because it looked the best. I decided to use latex because I'm a fetishist and it simply looks better in the end. A classmate was arguing with our teacher about ides: texmaker vs kile. And I'm like "I use vim". So my teacher is like kk
Later that class, when we actually started doing stuff I started the ssh session to my server because I don't know any good c++ compilers for win and I'm too lazy to get a portable version of cygwin (or whatever its called). So in my server I open vim and start coding my tool for Fermat Primes (Fermatsche Primzahlen, too lazy to actually translate). And this teacher seriously is the best teacher I ever met in my life. Usually teachers are like " dude r u hakin' the school server?" and I'm like bruh its just vim and I'm doing it this way because I cannot code on your PC coz I can't install a compiler. And this teacher is like "oh hey you actually use vi, all cool kids used it in 2000. I first though u were kidding and stuff..." And we continued talking about more of stuff like that and I have to say that this is the first teacher that actually understands me. Phew
Now I'm going to continue writing my 30 pages piece of trash latex doc and hope it'll end good1 -
Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol
Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"
Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.
Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".
It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.
I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.
I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.
Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.
Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)
NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.
Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.
But honestly its fine.
You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english
Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?
Well. ありがとう for reading.18 -
So my school makes a survey each semester where students grade their teachers performance. This is all well and good.
Till I found out today that admin averages all the teachers scores for that class year. So all the good ones are worse and the bad ones are better off.
So I guess someone is desperate for some extra cash by making the school look better than it is... -
I am from a third world country. Although I went to one of the better schools in my neighborhood, the education didnt work out very well for me (maybe because I wasn't the brightest kid in class). Nothing made much sense except math, but didnt do very well at that either since the number of equations I had to memorize increased every year and I hated memorizing. One day programming started to make sense and from then I got the best scores in the class for programming, somewhat decent scores in math and languages and barely made it for other subjects.
I just continued doing the only thing I was good at. I am really curious about physics, chemistry, biology and other subjects and I religiously watch youtube videos and read articles explaining related concepts. Maybe I would have followed a different career path if my science teachers made any sense. Or maybe I am too dumb for that.
Is programming for me? I am still not sure but I know this is something I like.2 -
[Long rant about one of the worst school project I got]
I just saw that post about Lego coding, and it reminds me a project we had to do for high school.
The project was about a robot that will do volleyball services. My group decided with me that I should go on programming the robot since it was my idea to pick that subject to work on. So I started to investigate the robot and the programming software.
This was one of the worst thing si could get. For some reason I didn't find any tutorial about how to program the robot, so I had to test it out. When you don't want to break the robot, that's clearly not the best thing to do.
So what about the teachers? We had 3. Two told me they don't know stuff about this, and one MIGHT know stuff but not how to use the software. Great...
Plus I add that we were asking a teacher some help, being desperate, and literally, he came, made a joke about "how long he didn't play with Lego toys", laughed at his own joke and left. Thank you, that was really helpful while I was worrying about the project that will help us getting my degree, clearly helped us.
So I managed to do something really basic, where you input the direction for the aim with the arrows on the robot, and central button was for shooting. Basically basic stuff. Even not optimal because the robot hit its own screen but a weaker throw wasn't working, so we had to put some protection over the screen and the arm.
Another group of another class were working on the same subject, so we visited them one day to see their stuff.
They made a joystick that was fully operational, with analogic direction input, precise aiming and shooting stuff. The best way to make myself doubt about my stuff.
So we did the presentation and for whatever reason, the other class (not only the other group) got bad reviews of their projects, made by my famous joking teacher, and we got a good review. Didn't understand, but whatever.
So did I learn stuff?
Absolutely not. It was one of the worst pain in the ass to learn the programming syntax and stuff, and when I graduated, I forgot anything concerning programming stuff, my engineering school did all the stuff.
This is some experience you don't forget, the one that don't make yourself grow at all but the effort is real.1 -
I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)
(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗
First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂
Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.
I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.1 -
Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.
This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:
1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.
2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...
3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.
FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.6 -
So a friend got on MATFYZ (best and probably hardest Uni in our country - Math& Physics) and told me some first impressions today and well, fuck me.. or us..
One dude said he hadn't had much of a time for preparations on getting onto the Uni because he was busy writing learning book about nano stuff and not only for students, but for fucking TEACHERS! He was at the same age as I am now when he wrote this. There were more stories but this one's insane.
Meanwhile I'm here programming fizzbuzz not even studying IT related school (don't ask, bad decisions, or maybe good, probably good, but still) and not knowing shit really.
Is it just me orrr ?3 -
I'm attending a design course, and in the last few weeks they're teaching us a bit of web programming. The teacher of this part of the course is totally not competent, even though he has every possible Microsoft certification, it's clear that he has not idea what he's doing: he just reads some tutorial on languages and repeats us what he reads. Even when people ask him something about the code he writes, he just repeats what tutorials say...
E.g. he taught Angular 2 without saying anything about how typescript works; the last week i stayed home for a few days and took my time to read all the Angular tutorial and some general typescript, and everything is much clearer.
Also (and this is my favourite part), here's what he said us to do to run Angular projects: he made us open Visual Studio (VISUAL STUDIO!!! With his 60 fuckingGB) and press "Run" on the top of the page... For whose don't see any problem here, the "Run" button runs everytime the command "ng serve" that runs the "webserver" that runs the Angular app, so the opening of any project took about 1 whole minute for each little modification we did...
I had to explain that we could run the command on a terminal and use any editor as VS Code. He didn't even think about that, he said that it was a very good idea (You don't say!).
Fortunately, this is not a Web Development course, and we did only a few weeks with him; the other teachers are very competent in their job...2 -
Am considering quitting college and learning online. It's much better for me personally. I have learned more via Internet in a week than what I did from college in years. I am from India. Most of what they teach is pretty much useless & outdated and the teachers seem to think of technology as a static thing. I don't know if I can ever convince my parents to let me quit. What they think is college = job = good life. Thanks for letting me post here. Had to let it out.20
-
At my school we use iPads (I don't know why) and the teachers can see what's on your screen, lock you inside an app, block apps/basically everything, lock/shut down your iPad, uninstall apps and they can even see what's your location. It sucks ass, but with my "professional" hacking skills I figured out a way to hack the system. If I use a VPN, for some reason they can't do anything to my iPad. I'm still waiting for the day my school is going to ditch iPad's an buy us laptops, but at least I can sleep good at night without having my teacher doing stuff to my iPad.
(I have a ton of other things I don't like about my school, and would love to rant about, but I don't want this rant to be 5000 pages long)5 -
My first memories of the very first computer i got?
Not sure exactly when that was but all the first memories are of me playing games:
Some paper plane game on the really old macs (giant screens i think it was highlighter orange)
My auntie also had a computer when i was little i'd visit her for the holidays and j played some kid game about dogs.
When we got our first computer i remember some 2d metroid like game but it was where you play as some lady with a whip.
Also duke nukem 1, one of the games me and my dad played together.
Then later on we got a win98 computer i played age of empires and solitaire!
(i used to ride around on my bike with a sword pretending i was a cataphract LOL, i was never very good at RTS games when i was little so i'd build things and not have room for units to move, i kept building houses thinking you need a lot lol, me and the AI were at a stalemate, most because the buildings were in the way)
I remember my teacher giving me tips about age of empires when i was in primary, one of my favourite teachers too.
Good times -
First rant here
Well thing is that my CS school did have teachers and half the grade was from a product presentation and half on teammates reviews.
My teammates mostly didn't have any idea what SOAP was. That was the theme of the project and we had to make a Webservice which they didn't even understood what it meant.
I spent one day from 8am to 1am trying to explain, in despair I ended up not sleeping, not eating, working 24/7 all the week and collapsing of exhaustion.
I was taken to the hospital, got back home but have lost time and had only implemented 3/4 of the functionalities.
The others (6) only did managed to make a basic GUI I would have to link myself. One of them, the project manager had done testing and lots of good stuff, made a 80pages report but the other 5 were shitty.
They all gave me the worst peer review grade but the manager, they got A I got C (ABCD scale).4 -
My Data Communication & Computer Networks (DCCN) teacher was the best teacher I've seen.
Teaching can be super hard. You're one against like sixty others who aren't interested in being there. To make that good learning environment, making the subject interesting etc, it not easy. Some justify that, "I can only bring the horse to the water" & proceed to just regurgitate whatever is on the book. Others cross question you & impose punishments - try to make you learn by fear.
But my DCCN teacher - she had the right balance between strictness & humour. So kids took her seriously (did homework, weren't late), yet never feared her - we felt comfortable asking doubts/questions.
She had some good tactics, like asking us to teach certian chapters - that made us learn better. She would revise them in the end also, incase we missed anything.
My best moment with her was when I scored the highest in my internals. She picked up my paper & showed the class - "see? Just two pages & he scored so much". There's was always those students who pump out a lot of stories/essays or whatever that comes to their mind about the topic in question. Lots of teachers just blindly give marks - "oh, s/he wrote this much, so it must be right".
But my DCCN teacher had zero tolerance for garbage. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Some even believe that the number of marks = number of lines you have to write!! Doesn't matter what you write. So, I was super glad when this teacher upped the standards. -
Tl;dr coding is awesome, but teaching good programming skills is fundamental. Take some time to teach and help someone in need!
This morning I had to help two of my students who were unable to write a simple program to simulate a random sampling. It reminded me of how helpless I felt when I started out, and how I felt stupid for not getting easy concepts (and now I'm in love with programming). Here on devRant I hear so many stories about bad programming teachers, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'm the most impatient person on this planet, but I love teaching and I wish more people did it. So, go out and spread the word, fellow devRanters!3 -
So I was at my second meeting about a project I just joined as a volunteer. There's two teachers, me (1st semester CS), a guy almost graduating and a guy in the second semester. In the first meeting the teachers explained what the project's about and what we need to do. Me, wanting to show that I'm good hoping I'd get offered a paid position in the future, got to the second meeting with some stuff already done in Rust. Teachers mistook me for the 2nd semester student (which, by the way, thinks everything server-side is done in node.js) and told him it was a very good job "he" had done with the rust program. The fucker didn't say shit and just took all credit for what I did.
Later that day I sent an email to everyone with the repo link to make sure they knew I was the one that wrote the program and a month or two down the road I made some pretty awesome work while the other two just sat on their asses, so I think they know it was me.
Nonetheless, I got pretty pissed about that and kinda regret not saying anything at the meeting. I do think I kinda made the right choice of keeping quiet, trying to show team loyalty (?) or something like that.
Should I have done it differently? Would you say something at the meeting if it was you?5 -
Competing on different subjects while in school have taught me how to work efficiently under pressure. My teachers have given me a systemmatic approach to problem solving, from divide and conquer (math), careful reading and analysis of the problem, as well as good documentation (physics).
And last, but not least, I learned to type fast, which is really helpful in speedy expression of thoughts. And for that, I gotta thank IRC. -
So my math teachers who don't even know a single bit about Dev, even ms paint, came into the IT classroom and said
"Learn hard students, get good marks for Advanced Level and get a scholarship. Then become a software engineer. Then you'll have a wonderful life. You'll have a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, Mercedes, big house. You'll be able to live in relaxation"2 -
So my kid tells me that her teacher said my kid could teach the class. I told my kid that was great, good job!
Later my kid is talking to me:
Kid: Nerd!
Me: If I remember correctly. Your teacher said you could teach her class. My teachers never told me that. I think that makes you the nerd.
Kid: <big frown>6 -
In school we mounted a USB receiver for a wireless mouse in the teachers computer... Since we had only 15 minutes left, heute quit the lesson since he couldnt get a new one in time...
The good old days -
Okay, so there's this guy in my school who's an asshole. Everybody hates him. Even the teachers. But specially me. This bastard keeps messing with me. So one day I decided to take revenge shot. I was learning game development with unity at the time. So, I made a game on him. For androids. I was only a beginner, so the game was not as good as i expected but did the job. I shared the game with some friends over Google Drive.
And ...
Its been two weeks now and almost all my seniors now know me. They really liked the game. People probably just passed on the link to their friends.
Here's a link if wanna check it out:
https://drive.google.com/file/u/...4 -
Actually my degree helped me a lot, I owe my teachers most of what I know, I learned so much, I even learned to love programming with one of my teachers and now I can't think of myself doing anything apart from programming. It got me my first job, and soon I realized my formation (and my college partner's) was among the best in my country, I was soon able to solve problems that no one else in the team could, and could learn new stuff faster than them, all the graduated from my same college usually had better projects and instant good reputation because they knew we were well prepared.
So YES, my degree helped me and my friends a LOT and I feel I couldn't have chosen a better thing to study or a better place to do it. -
(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)
The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.
This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.
Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.
So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.
Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.
Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.
PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day. -
I have no specific story to tell (for now. Will post ke if i remember one) but i have had tons of CS teachers that are shit. From ones who don't know shit to ones who are so bad as a human being i am sure thrte are hundreds of people out there to kill them. I have had multiple teachers where all they did was read out a book and we'd have o site everything they read. Whole fucking semester. And not just one person or once. M-U-L-T-I-P-L-E TIMES AND TEACHERS. then I ve had ones who would rejection my code even if it's better, is right, can andle more edge cases, most likely magnitfrs of times faster and isn an eye sore with just effig if-else on op of if-else nested within if-else with many for loops. Then there are those who want you to do just what they want and expect you to not have a life of your own. Those who blatantly abuse their powers. Those who couldn't care less. Those who are not that bad a teacher but their attitude and style just makes you want to leave. There's one currently who wants a group of 4 people in second year to develop a full blown industry level application in mere 3 weeks. AND WE ARE HAVING OUR THEORY PAPRRS INBETWEEN FOR 2 EFFING WEEKS. So that's just like a month. Fortunately I have a group that's good enough that I can have them do the testing and filling up the documentation (did I mention that he needs full documentatiin for software plus a report on how our development process) and have them work on presentation (yup. We need to present this thing) all for just 50 marks. 1 uni credit. Our system still gives 80% weightage to pure theory. Plus the practical part is somewhat theory too.
Our HOD wants us *insists*forces** to stay back at college and work on projects (which is nice but what he ments is use the shitty outdated books from early 2000s to study something). Now I'd be happy to stay back if college provided decent internet (I am not asking for gigabit speeds. Even 1-2Mbps would work) and place to sit. But nope, our college non-teaching staff is eager to send us out of their department and by extention college building. There is literally nowhere you can sit. Plus yup, there is no internet and nowhere for you to plug your laptop in. That's a moot point anyway because they don't want you to use your laptop in college library or anywhere anyways. Plus you don't get much of mobile data too because of the building design. Those work only near windows. Why would I be at college if I can get a 50+Mbps down, area to sit, snacks, port to charge all at home. And you'd say we should talk with him about this – well it's not his issue is all he has to say.
Well, such is life in Indian colleges. And my college/uni is one of the better ones.1 -
I figured it all out, where all the bad code comes from, I know it now!
I think good developers need two things, an ego that makes them wanting to be competent and perceived as such and (very important) a problem with authority!
All the bad code is written by people who wanted to be liked by their teachers. The PM and PO are their teachers now and they make everything possible for them. Technical debt and human costs are swept aside when the authorities want a stupid feature now - because they have to like you and you need to be a nice pet to whip! -
"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"
CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"
CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"
CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"
Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(7 -
I always hated in school computing lessons when the teachers pet students would snitch on you for getting around the school network stuff.
Many people in the lesson would always play games instead of doing what they were meant to. So the teacher turned off the internet in the room using the admin control stuff. Then when I found a way around it all so I could watch some educational YouTube videos, the stupid teachers pet would snitch on me. Luckily the teacher knew I wasn’t using it to mess around, always felt good when he said that I could access it because I’m the biggest security threat to the school.
Did you ever have issues with snitches in computing lessons?6 -
(a bit late for wk73 but I wanted to post this anyway)
Back in my first year of university, we had to write a relatively simple (though it looked super complicated back then) C++ console application. I don't know what it's called, but it's that game where the computer generates a random 4 digit code and you have to try to guess what it is. Every time you try, it will tell you which digits are correct, which would be correct if they were in a different position and which are outright wrong.
Anyway, the program had a main menu with a help option that would output a short guide on how to play the game. Instead of hard coding it into the source code, the "guide" had go be written in a separate text file and then read and dumped to the screen when necessary.
Here came my great idea on how to read files. Instead of looping through the file until I reached the end, I counted the number of lines my text file had and wrote some gem of a piece of code like this:
for (int i = 0; i<11; i++){
line = file.readline();
cout << line << endl;
}
My teacher obviously took points off for doing such a stupid thing, and I remember complaining A LOT about it. I argued that 11 was a constant because I didn't plan on changing the text file, and that the teacher had no right to take points off for only reading 11 lines because the file only had 11 lines, so it was read in full.
Goddammit, what an innocent little brat I was. I'm glad my first programming teachers were good enough to stay firm and teach me how to do things the right way, even if it's the hard way. -
Been a little inactive for a long time, but I could really use your advices fellow ranters.
I'm in my senior year of highschool and I got an extraordinary internship at a company (it's not possible to get a job in web dev in this country as a highschooler).
The pay is just a little pocket money, but projects are fun (web apps in js) and I can include this experience iny resume later on.
Basically the company wants me to go to uni/college. The teachers too. Oh, parents too.
I have been suffering in schools for my whole life, I really don't feel lile I could make myself go to school another 4 years.
And I also don't have the slightest idea of what I wanna do with my life, I have no goals currently and I'm afraid of that while I'm in this existential crisis state it is easier for people to tell me what's good for me.
Objectively this is a country of papers, so I guess it doesn't matter wheter it's web dev or the next super digital intelligence I do as a profession.
I also want to travel the world, but I need money for that Xd. If possible I'd love to move to another country, but still have no idea.
Thanks for reading through this depressing shit.9 -
My two best friends has been the most influential mentors I've ever had. One is a compiler engineer at a major computing company and the other one is a security engineer at a major company in Japan.
Both have sat down and taken the time to not only teach me different aspects of the computing environment, but empowered me to learn more on my own. One project I was working on ended up tapping into both of their teachings. I took a moment to think back on when they were teaching me and felt so grateful to have such patient teachers.
The moral here is that not everyone knows what you do. What makes a good teacher is someone who takes the time to teach and empower the individual. It really goes a long way. -
So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.
He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.
Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.
Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.
I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized. -
Reunions!
I'm a research fellow, so I have 2 teachers that are orientors.
We never have good reunions. They asks me every week to send a report of work done, but they never give me feedback. I ask what I can do next, sometimes they answer, sometimes they don't. So, some weeks I don't know what to do.
Almost everytime, they go to my room with somebody and ask to show the application. And with that,I need to interrupt my workflow, change one boolean variable (because we have a machine learning that is very slow, I have a if to throw the result I pre-calculated). After all this trouble, I need to speak (as he asked), but he starts interrupt while I'm speaking. -
During my education there was this "Exception('Smoking hot girl')", and also very kind/sweet I used to help a lot, and tutor best practices on whatever project she would throw herself into.
(It should be noted that half of our teachers where incompetent, or flat out wrong, so we kinda had to use more than usual time helping other people)
But being a shy guy, and having the spine of a worm, I got stuck as a 'personal teacher' for a good period of time. Never had the guts to ask her out.
Not sure if it's selfish to focus your attention on one person because you liked the girl, that's a lot of time I could've used to help others. Or if I should be proud of what I did, I do believe she'd dropped out otherwise....
But nonetheless I did enjoy the time.1 -
I think the thing that sucks about high school (or school in general, really) is that they don't really have many opportunities for the people that like to program or do anything with computers.
The only classes that have to do with computers at all (In my high school) is Intro to Programming (Which is what I'm taking, which has HTML, CSS and JavaScript), some computer science classes and finally the Cyber-patriot team. (Which is for Navy ROTC and it consists of Cyber Security, competitions and actual Linux computers).
The only few of eight classes I find actually interesting is Intro to Programming, NJROTC, and Plant Science. (Because not only the subjects, but the teachers (and Sergeant) actually make it fun, interesting and easy to understand, while the rest don't feel like they're doing a good job.)4 -
Really long story. It begins when I was 11 years old, Harry Potter was kind of a hit (it was the beginning) and a lot of site based of the universe where popping everywhere on the internet. I wanted to make mine so much I subscribed to a french website which offered free tutorials on differents languages. The site is still up, it is now called OpenClassrooms and it saved my life a lot.
I tried to learn HTML (4 at the time if my memory's good) and CSS, but my mother didn't believe in my project and made me quit.
Nine years after, I was looking for something to do in my life: I tried a cursus in art history and archeology, I made a Baker school, but my life didn't feel filled.
I heard about a formation in a town near mine, and was for everyone, newbies or veterans, who wanted to have their diploma either in networks or in code.
The coding classes where fantastic. We learned VB.net, Pascal, php, laravel, C#, SQL, PL/SQL (we had a teacher who was absolutely fan of Oracle), I topped my class and now I am in the next formation for my Bachelor. Today I learn Java, Symfony, Android.
The ones who taught me to code? Internet, my teachers, books. But my teachers were the most important, because they gave me the confidence. -
I don't have any experience in teaching, but I'd venture to say that teaching anything is hard. For most subjects, teaching has been refined over thousands of years to be easier and meaningful. Not CS. As has been mentioned by many people CS is a very new subject when compared to the likes of maths, for example, and education systems haven't been able to cope with it adequately (nor should they be expected to).
That the CS industry is rapidly evolving certainly doesn't help matters, but in reality that shouldn't really be that big of a problem (at least in earlier years of education). The basics of computer systems and programming don't really change that much (please correct me if I'm wrong) and logic stays the same. Even if you learn stuff that's a bit out of date it can still be useful and good lessons should be able to be applied to new technologies and ideas.
Broken computers is a big inconvenience, but a lot of very useful things can be done without a computer, and I should think the situation is a lot better than it was 5 years ago. What I think would be good, instead of trying to use broken computers would be to get students to set up and use a raspberry pi each; you learn about something other than windows, learn how to install an OS and you don't need that much computing power for teaching people computer science.
I think the main problem is a lack of inspiring teachers. Only a very few teachers will be unable to get you through the exams if you put in the effort, but quite a lot of the time students don't put in the effort because they can blame it on the teacher.
My solution would be to try and get as many students into computer science as possible and the rest will follow: more people will become teachers, more will be invested in the subject, more attention will be payed to the curriculum.
That's not to say I don't agree that many of the problems that have been mentioned need to be fixed for CS education to work properly, just that there is no way that I can see to fix them currently without either creating more problems or some very rich person giving a load of money.
This has gone on a lot longer than I expected so I'll stop now.14 -
So let's do a "community building" exercise.
What was your biggest tech pet peeve?
I'll start:
I hate it when people (especially teachers) give us a printout with a link to a website (like a good docs link) without shorting it.
I mean, we have to type out that 100+ character string of random numbers and letters. Then you make a mistake and have to retype it. (I.k,. First world problems)
Let's here yours. It can be about employers, teachers, or anyone else you can think of.3 -
Guidance is a key to sucess of one's life.
What i mean to say here? I'm a student from a very low ranked college and here we don't get much of guidance on diverse fields. I totally agree that its not all college fault, i'll clarify in end.
When I was in my 1st year i had no clue from where to start, i did my research and got to know about git then i asked my teachers about it and they said they don't know what it is. I was like now what to do, i started exploring on my own. I wasted my 1st year , just learned c and c++, then 2nd year came, i got introduce from linked in i started exploring it but didn't got anywhere, i asked for help but didn't get much of some path i can walk on. Now it's3rd year and now i'm aware of many things that i wish i did in my previous years, so I'm exploring it now. I'm now the Google DSC Lead for my campus which is the first ever official group of my college as well as my university. I'm hustling, fighting, trying to explore as many things possible. But some things that i wish i knew but it's alright, now i am at the right path, and i will for sure add this too my sucess speach that i was nothing and now i'm something.
I stopped blaming my college long time ago because world is not here to listen my excuses they want results and i'm fine with that.
I'm looking forward to opportunities that will come to my way.
Also i forgot to mention that when i wasn't able to crack premium colleges and i can't go to private college i decided to work hard
From 60% scoring student to topper of my class, its just when you realize you are good to go. Just don't stop and give your best.
Thanks
Hitesh Tomar -
My first programming teacher was from a payed course and he was a very good teacher but it just taught me the ABC of programming. How to be a developer and how to develop that's something acquired mainly by self teaching, practice and experience. So that the second course I followed I didn't learn anything new, the teachers were not so good and I they had to learn from me. It was shit. At least it was a free course.
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Top 5 Reasons for Not Discussing Weird Topics in Your Graduate Admission Essay
Knowing the top five reasons for not discussing weird topics in your graduate admission essay is very important. There is really no strict requirement about what kind of topic you use, as long as you can discuss it effectively. However, choosing weird topics may not really work for you, especially if it’s a very controversial or sensitive one. The following are the top five reasons why you should avoid discussing weird topics in your essay.
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