spikyman

A very short list:

* The trick is to set everyone's expectations low, especially your own. E.g.; Even for a relatively small project, make sure management understands that there is no way to guarantee a schedule.

* If you think a step will take x days, schedule 4x days. EXPECT 4x. Generally, EXPECT bizarre failures to fry your so-called "schedule."

* Simple, obvious steps that work initially will suddenly stop working, and likely near the project's end.

* At least one thing not obviously connected to your project will stall everything (e.g., an old switch, a DB update, something somebody band-aided with COBOL 40 years ago**, ad nauseam.)

* You will almost certainly have at least one hair-pulling interaction with the security team. Hopefully, you'll have someone higher up to help you.

**yeah, that happened.

Once upon a time, there were computers made by IBM, Wang, and a few others that did nothing but word processing. They were massively expensive, and in the early 80's, were quickly killed off by the WordStar program running on the first wave of commercial desktop PC's.

I was contracted by a law firm to manage about a dozen temp workers to convert 1000s of Wang-formatted files to WordStar. Their IT people had us opening each Wang file with a conversion feature in WordStar, and then saving it. WordStar had to be opened and closed for each conversion. (The PCs got files from what was, essentially, a shared hard disk, but DOS and WordStar ran from floppy disks. I.e., it was all very slow.)

I spent my first few hours on the job figuring out what WordStar was doing. I discovered the conversion feature was a stand-alone program, and then worked out the syntax for feeding it a file. Then I built a batch file that would recursively convert entire directories. Needless to say, I was out of a crushingly dull job in a few days instead of a month or so.

I'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge?

The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.

I'd like to add that many studies suggest that the fastest way to increase your income in IT is to job-hopping. E.g., my son has made 3 moves in 3 years from high-end help desk to deveops engineer, at triple his first salary. He has also very deliberately chosen jobs that would provide him with growth opportunities, because he didn't want to be siloed in any one role. None of them were with FANGs, but given all the layoffs in the news, being at a monster company does not guarantee you a job.