During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worked and fulfilled all requirements. We all got a not completed at final grade. Found out later that only 3 people in the class got an A, and they were the only females in the class, everyone else got a not completed. Immediately after having a convo with the "professor" and the threat of convo with dean of students, suddenly everyone got a passing grade. What a piece of human garbage.

I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid.

My "filesystems and database design" class was basically howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in actual file system and database design

Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic bullshit and skip into the real world.

It’s hard to say with this little information, but it sounds like you might have chosen the wrong school for your goals?

The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).

It was the closest reasonably priced state school near to my home thst took transfer credits from my community College. I should have gone for copywriting

The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic

> The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic

This failure also may be a sign that it was the wrong school. A course taught badly or indifferently can make a subject tedious or difficult, that when taught well is exciting and easy.

I loved my math prof, I just suck at math. I took him twice.

Stuff like this makes me angry. I had similar experiences in uni.

I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.

My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.

"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"

Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.

My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.

- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics

I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me).

In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.

IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.

It's been a while since I've touched SQP, and most of my experience is with psql, but as far as I can recall if you type commands into the psql console without a semicolon the commands don't get executed properly?

Still a dumb reason to deduct points though

You are correct, on the command line you need it but pretty much every GUI tool and language binding auto-add it for you. It felt very nit-picky and not at all based in reality. I got all the joins/limits/order/where/etc correct, the semicolon doesn’t matter for what I felt the test should be actually testing on. Testing human’s ability to memorize or write perfect syntax when they will never do that unaided in reality is just silly.

> IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places.

I hate to agree, but yeah.

I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use this."

His "computer graphics" class was all about using the original GLUT library. The school specifically highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS department students to use. Think about this combo for about 5s.

Yeah, the lib wasn't available in arm format...

The incompatible library and overly expensive computer recommendations aside, CS is full of things "you literally never use". It's a theoretical discipline more akin to mathematics than anything else, and it certainly isn't software engineering, to the surprise of many students (including me, when I was one).

Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.

One of my professors would mark us down for each line of code that is over 80 characters.

What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.

When I had BS classes that required attendance, I'd just sit reading a book. Teacher doesn't respect me, I don't respect them. Screw em.

Completing university is the most useless project I've worked on.

Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"

I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers overtime. As engagement managers got into overage (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit.

My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all weekend and told me to "ensure not work over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.

So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend, confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to "only log 40hrs this week".

He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt like that again there would be consequences"

So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent the email again.

I feel there is something missing in this story… what was implied by your email about cancelling your flight home the agreement to only log 40 hours? Sounds like you were just saying “affirmative”… what is the stunt he thinks you were pulling? And what is the second email about which you mention gmail and taking him off.

It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing something.

He was creating a paper trail for illegal working/billing practices.

The stunt is creating a paper trail.

Only working 40 hours is different from only logging 40 hours, this is the important part:

> they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours.

The email was to get in writing that his boss told him to lie about how many hours he worked.

The concept seems weird to me. I have never been given a mark by a teacher that matters. Exams were administered by independent bodies.

In the UK that’s the case through high school and college (UK definition, 16-18) but at university the exams and coursework are graded by the lecturer/professor. So that’s likely what happened here.

Yes, academic administration is different in different countries. In the US it's especially criticized for its subjectivity, here which we have a great example of.

It was obviously a joke you didn't get

It's actually pretty unfortunate if they heard that, didn't get confirmation, and just stopped going to class.

Yeah it's actually a little terrifying, almost a lack of survival instinct

Not so concise, but I've done this (kinda). I did give a presentation to the class later in the semester about a practical implementation of things they worked on all semester though.

You may very well be right. (TBH this possibility had never crossed my mind till your comment.) I prefer to Assume Positive Intent even at the risk of being the butt of a sardonic joke.

Was this at Stevens Tech? I had a Prof Tewksbury there that would have done something just like this.

The very same! It was the intro to compsci for engineers that paired with the robot project… c 2007.

Another kind of sad Tewks story is, once I went to see him in his office, and I witnessed him giving a grad student and early edition copy of a Claude Shanon tome. Clearly was intended as a nice gift. The grad student didn’t get it, and Tewks had to explain who Shanon was to a EE PhD candidate. I wanted to jump up and down and get his attention but I was just that pesky undergraduate with some scheme to get a free A…

Anyways he was a Bell Labs guy and full of lore and wisdom, but I would have loved to have known him as a younger man. Same with Harold Stalwen.

I did have the great honor of taking courses with Roger Pinkham and Norman J Morgenstein Horing who despite both being in their 80s were possessed of incredible intellect and didactic powers. Pinkham in particular was the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Gandalf.