3 Jun
Rant. No, really. Keep your distance.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
So after 3 years as a computer science major, I find myself fervently wishing I would’ve done something else with my time at college. Why? Well, I’m finding out that, in all this time here, I really haven’t been taught a damn thing. Nothing I’ve learned or done in any of my computer science classes can possibly ever help me in my search for a job (save two projects, but I’ll get to those later). Also, our school is in love with using Solaris as a build environment for EVERYTHING we do, which means anything that possibly COULD be resume material needs to be ported to work on an intel box. Porting things from Solaris to x86 has never worked all that well for me, just because Solaris is the biggest POS operating system I have -ever- seen in my life. Perfectly legal code that works everywhere else makes it break. Blatant errors in code don’t trigger appropriate errors (“Hey! Let’s keep running the program even though it just overwrote its own stack with garbage because the programmer did something stupid, just so it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on when the programmer tries to debug!”).
So stupid. From what I’ve seen, 90% of workplaces nowadays are using Visual Studio in some form or another, and in the course of my education I’ve never been taught how to use it. “Oh, we teach theory here in the computer science department. This isn’t a -trade- school!” *derisive laughter* What the hell? Seriously! I came to this place to get an education, and the only thing I’m learning is how irrelevant an education truly is!
It’s a truly frightening thing to see a computer science program stuck in the stone ages, so to speak. Watching professors explain how teaching alternate languages and development environments and the like is unnecessary and just a stupid idea makes me furious. It takes people here years, on average, just to get a *grasp* of the Solaris operating system well enough to use it to program. Why? Because they’re never taught. There isn’t a SINGLE class at this university that teaches people how to use the *nix family of operating systems. No Perl classes. No Python classes. I find it sad somehow that many people are still using nano and pico to program in their senior year of college.
The other thing I find scary is that a lot of people I’ve talked to like to use big words without understanding what they truly mean. “Oh, well, I can’t be getting a segmentation error across my stack because the heap hasn’t been corrupted enough for the garbage collector to complain.” … Okay. There are so freaking many problems with that statement, I truly don’t know where to begin. Personally, I feel that unless somebody can explain something to a person in terms a three-year-old can understand, they don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about. “Oh, well, if you didn’t understand what I just said, your level of intelligence is obviously simply too far below mine to comprehend the material.” Wrong. Your level of intelligence isn’t high enough to break the material down into something other people can comprehend, and saying otherwise is simply convincing the other person they can never learn and breaking their self-esteem, which is generally the most fragile part of a person. Usually, once somebody’s self-esteem and self-confidence in something is gone, it takes a long time to put it back together. What right does a person have to hurt another person’s feelings simply because they’re suffering and they have some need to make the other person feel inferior?
Anyway, I’ll cut it short for tonight; that’s enough venting to keep me happy for the moment. Expect more posts here as the summer rolls around and I find myself with more time to spare.