anuragojha
"Bosses (managers) get stuff done through meetings – changing tasks every 60 minutes." -- I don't know what bosses you are or have worked with but incompetent leadership and poor software engineering acumen can't be solved with buying software subscriptions.
Why are you trying to make for the tool being bad when the blame lies with people? I am tired with hearing this bogus notion of friction between Bosses, PM, Engineers and somehow you can pay your way out of lack of alignment in an organization.
If you are thinking about dropping this whole line, my advice to you is (1) do what you need to do to get a job as a software engineer; (2) walk away from it after two months.
Do anything else after this, but make sure you nail this sucker that is making you feel this way. Make sure you beat this challenge before walking away. I am from India, until a few years ago, every fresh graduate and I mean civil engineer, arts, mechanical engineer, electronic engineer, you name it, got a job at an Indian IT firm. 8 years hence, they are coding away, carrying on. People who don't even have the basics in CS are making it in the IT industry. You have a CS degree, get some use out of it. Don't listen to bullshit from others and yourself about doing something else. The most celebrated victories are comes from the individuals in the more dire situations.
But before anything else, start exercising a full hour every single day, eat and sleep well. Dress well throughout the day. Do this for a full week and start fresh next day if you fail. It will work like magic and help you pull your head out of wherever you have it parked. Oh and before you sleep, dream of making it through.
Do you have any examples from the current roster of leading nations that have used their resources to contribute to stability of the world?
The sad reality is USA does all it can to retain power. All other are trying everything they can to obtain it.
The course teaches not just "how to learn" but really "how to learn and become a master of the subject". While being curious and interested definitely gets the learning cart rolling, I doubt one can become a master without deliberately focusing on weak areas of understanding, practice and reflection -- all painful tedious stuff. For me learning sticks when I associate it with things I already know, zoomed in and out a couple of times to both understand a concept itself and how it fits in the big picture. So I do believe having "a method" to learn and deploy new learnings.
Some like me grew up in a culture of rote learning where we repeatedly read and smear the same text over and over again hoping something would stick. A lot of the teaching of the courses were completely counter-intuitive to me. I have spent close to 25k hours studying CS in an academic setting and could have saved myself so much time studying effectively. I've been working in SV for several years now and into some serious studying again so this course was very timely for me.
Few additional tricks I picked up: * Recall(as you mentioned) is critical to understanding. Effective recall also connects a topic just learned with other known topics. * A problem looks solvable but its important to actually apply yourself and arrive at the solution. The process of learning does not offer rewards until the mind has been exercised. * Deliberate practice of poorly understood concepts. Don't fall into the trap of fooling yourself to believe that you have understood a concept or practicing problems that you are already good at. * Read through material quickly to to create a "framework" or stick-figures in the mind. Gradually add new concepts to the basic framework. * Learning is best done with frequent breaks to absorb information. Learning is also a passive process where the neurons need time to grow. * Repetition spaced across several days forces us to recall. This helps strengthen memories and filing concepts into long-term memory bank. * Better sleep helps.
I could go on. Really wonderful course.