

No Disrespect - gensym
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/no-disrespect.html

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brlewis
I'm only going to touch on a side point of this article:

"Respect comes from what you accomplish"

Only partly true. You need to sell your accomplishments; they don't sell
themselves.

------
vlad
Who does not understand recursion? Who has not learned the recursive version
of quicksort at least a dozen times? Recursion is fast at the expensive of
memory. It's also very fun to make something that calls itself.

------
edw519
Anyone who puts down "business programming" so easily either has never done it
or is flame baiting. I suspect the latter.

Long gone are the days when the "system analyst" met with the users, wrote
tight functional specifications and handed them to the "business programmer".
In any organization that actually gets anything done, the two are now one
position, the "programmer analyst", and it's been that way for 20 years now.

And what does a programmer analyst have to do?

\- examine and understand almost any business situation

\- solve technical and logistical problems

\- present ideas clearly and cleanly

\- organize and manage time and tasks

\- play nicely with others

\- and, oh yea, code

And where do you find people who can do these things? Lots of places, but the
2 that come to mind first are from work experience or college experience.
Nobody actually believes anymore that you'll use anything from class in your
work. But it can be a very good place to develop the life skills needed to be
a programmer analyst.

Nobody's going to ask you to write a linear programming model using the
simplex method to determine how to allocate continuous inventory to customer
orders. (OK, maybe they will.) But they will wonder why Mary and Joe can't
seem to figure out how to use Program ORP560 to generate this month's
performance metrics. Is the problem with them or the program? They'll tell you
to figure it out and fix it. Count on it. And count on college to help you
become the kind of person who can do that.

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curi
The more fundamental problem with colleges is they have no idea how to help
people learn. And don't even think that's what they should be doing. No, they
want to "teach" students, by which they mean force them to listen to lectures,
whether they are interested and learning or not, and force them to do work
whether it helps them individually or not, and force them to take tests to
make sure they obeyed.

~~~
Alex3917
The only way to get through college without losing your sanity is to take
classes you know absolutely nothing about and don't particularly care about,
other than being vaguely curious. When I stopped taking CS and business
classes and started taking stuff like intro to Asian religions and intro
winemaking I got a lot happier. Your goal in taking a course should be to
learn enough of the terminology, context, and schemas that you can read the
rest of the journal articles in the field on your own. (You should also learn
to ask meaningful questions.)

Speaking of, I think everyone should take a class that covers the history and
methodology of religious study before graduating. Religious studies people,
the good ones at least, spend a lot of their time thinking about the same
stuff that net natives think about, like how memes go viral and how stuff
creates value for users. Even if you're a militant atheist it's still kind of
interesting and useful.

~~~
curi
Also if you are a militant atheist, and you take a religious studies class,
you might learn that you should not be a militant atheist.

~~~
Alex3917
Or at the very least you'll get good at sitting on your hands.

