So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Back when I was in college I had this CS professor who was by far the worst I can remember. The class was some bullshit 100 level required intro to CS course, and the guy tried to make it as difficult as possible. Beyond that, he was just a bad professor and did stupid things.

One of the most memorable things he did was give homework assignments, and then in order to collect them (it was a lecture class of about 150 people), he would have everyone pass their printed assignments to the right, and these sheets of paper traveled all the way across the lecture hall in every row of seats. It was a complete mess.

As you can probably guess, he frequently misplaced homework assignments, and many were probably lost through this ridiculous method of turning them in. Some people almost failed this ridiculously easy class because he lost their homework assignments. I think he lost like one of mine so it didn't matter much, but some other people in the class almost failed because of this. I think in the end he had to make a lot of exceptions because of this obvious trend.

Beyond that, he was an older guy who had worked for IBM, and he made that known at least once per class, usually more. "IBM this, IBM that!" So fucking annoying.

I'm glad to be long done with college.

When you're working on an uni project with a fucking idiot who tests stuff with this kind of messages and then forget to remove them a few days before the deadline… fml.

I work at the frontend, he at the backend, so I shouldn't even have to check his code, but after seeing this I fucking have to.

Useless to say that he loaded these kind of placeholders also in the database.
So the admin name is "PieroGay", which is the name of the professor who will evaluate the project...

The worst thing is this bastard will graduate in 1 month, while I probably next year.

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

Uni, programming 1.. professor had worst ppt presentation..I think it was about java..5? /* yeah, I'm old */
He was droning off in the most monotone voice..reading off the ppt, about types and blah blah blah..
Took us about 15mins to figure out he stopped teaching and was 'yelling' with the same monotone voice at one of my classmates to take their laptops and go play need for speed in the lobby..
I was sure I'd flunk the class and will never be able to complete the course, let alone get a job as a dev..he made programming look like the most boring thing on earth..

For fucking fuck sake I fucking hate those dense motherfuckers with professor degrees from university. Lazy shmucks.

How, HOW, can you, as a sentient human being, force anybody to use Netbeans for the fucking final project? Two SOAP services, two REST services and PHP for communication? In Netbeans!? WTF. You didn't even teach us PHP for fuck sake. Why can't I choose technology I'm using!?

And to top it all of, Netbeans is the worst IDE I've ever used. I'd rather kill myself with a spoon than use for even one more project. How can ANY TEACHER use it for lectures and tasks? Using it teaches you fucking nothing, because it's generating code for you. It makes you braindead when you just look at it. It's works like shit and looks like shit.

P.S.
I hope that devTea's swear-words blocker will have some fun with this rant.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Worst dev experience:
"Learning" vhdl

Best dev experience:
Actually learning because of a new, more competent professor

One of my cousin started his higher studies in Computer Sciences. He asked me to teach him any web language so I started with JavaScript. After one week, he came to me complaining that according to his C++ professor, JS is a worst programming language. The professor told him not to learn it.

WTH?

Last year, 2nd year of Uni, we had to create an app that read from CSV file that contained info on the no of ppl in each class and things like grades and such and had to display graphs of all the info tht you could then export as a pdf.

This had to also be sone in a team. I, however, hate doing anything other than programming (no team leader, pm bullshit) so I tell them I want to be one of the programmers (basically split the roles, rather than each one doing a bit of everything like my professor wanted) and we did.

I program this bitch wverything works well, I am happy. Day of the presentation comes, one of the graphs is broken... FUCK. I then go past it and never discuss the error. We got a 70.

I swear to God it worked on my computer -.-

I also have to mention that our professor was the client and he had set an actual deadline until we can ask him questions. After the deadline I realized I didn't know what a variable in the csv file was for and when I went to ask him he said "You should've asked me this before. I can't tell you now". My team was not the only one that didn't know and he gave the exact answer to everybody else. Got the answer from another team. Turns out it was useless.

He was the worst client ever. Why tf would you put a deadline on when you can ask the client questions?! I should be able to fucking ask questions during production if you want the product as you want it >.<

I have never regretted over anything in my life like I am regretting taking a course named Speech Technology this semester.
Professor is nice but problem is he is too ambitious. He wants us to study a research paper on our own and implement whatever it is in research paper. People have worked years to write those research papers. How we gonna do it in one or 1.5 months. And the worst part is there are not much technical resources and documentation available to understand how to implement those things. Just abstract theories.

May the force be with me!

Went to meet up last night. I was there acting like I have no experience and was just starting to learn programming. Suddenly this guy turns and faced me he said non verbatim “don’t use JavaScript thats the worst programming language, its used by wanna be software engineer. Use c# they have blazor so you wont have to code using JS”. My blood pressure went up guys. I understand this because hes kinda old and dont want to learn new things but i got caught off guard. To be honest im not mad, im just sad though, imagine if i was really new and had no experience and just started few months ago. All the hard work and studying will be nothing. Btw hes nice he offered me free food and beer its just JS.

If you’re learning any language specifically JS. Dont mind the naysayers. Just learn it and be good at it. Languages has its use cases. Conversation with whats better programming language is useless and a waste of time thats what my professor said and its true.

To the friend ranting about having to copy pseudo code on paper, I feel your pain. Analog IT professors are the worst.

I raise you one with : I had a professor that had me sent in source code files, a pdf with all the source code and a paper printout of every single line of code for a html/php project. Fifty pages of code printed for reasons I cannot understand. And no, I checked later, he didn't ask for it to take notes during the exam.

Emotionally painful dev learning experience: My laptop (and only computer I had in the area) broke at the worst possible time during university and the guy fixing it fucked it up meaning it took even longer. Combine this with:

*Stuck having to learn Android Studio in two weeks to make a whole-ass app with a professor who didn't know how to make a Hello World and gave us no resources. Pair project so I had someone depending on me to do my part, meaning a lot of sharing their computer just to be able to use Android Studio.
*Having to work on another solo project by using various public and awfully specced university computers. Said project involved real-time 3D graphics and was running at about a third of the speed it should on every machine.
*Realizing how much I depended on my laptop for entertainment and that I basically had nothing that could help me de-stress and relax at home.
*Not knowing when the laptop's spare parts would arrive or if the repair man would give me bad news and even more delays.
*A very poorly timed issue in my relationship.

I know university can be stressful even though it never really affected me before or since but man, those couple of weeks broke me.

Probably not worst but back when I was in graduate school I used '=' instead of '.equals()' for a string, by mistake. My professor was so pissed and taunted in front of whole class about how dumb people are here without taking any names(btw I didn't realize that guy was me until later) and gave me a low score

I told her later it really doesn't matter if I used either because '=' worked just fine in my case. She was a little more pissed after knowing that I wasn't wrong. 😜

Not the worst but kinda recent,
Me and my partner wrote a cool distributed service and tested it carefully on both windows and linux.
The course staff failed to run it, and guess what, it's our responsibility that their configuration is fucked up and we lost precious points in our grade due to that. All with a full backup of the responsible professor.
Luckily it's my last ever course and I don't give a sh*t.