Future Front Page Perpetrator?
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This person seems likely to wind up here sooner or later.
Just graduated with a master’s degree, but I internalised nothing
I just graduated with a software-engineering master’s degree with a good grade from a top-five university in the UK. I also have a bachelor's in computer science. I always revised just for exams and
TL;DR: Student has masters in software engineering. Got good marks at a top school by studying to the tests, then forgetting everything immediately after taking the exam. By his own admission, he "barely know[s] how to program[.]" Now he's looking for a job.
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I don't know... I feel like if he can pass the tests at a top university, he had to at least learn something. He may be out of practice, but he should be able to pick it up. Worst case he can be a manager or something.
On the other hand, I've worked with someone who got jobs at a bunch of top companies but couldn't even pass the first programming course. Turns out he just sent all his work to Russia, and just translated the comments when it came back. He was the original outsourcer.
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Sounds like CEO material.
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By my own admission, I have forgotten 82 percent of the material I "learned" in my seven years of college.
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Oh look, it's Academia SE again. How surprising.
is that Academia, Workplace and Interpersonal SE are the three most flame bait StackExchange sites in existence because they keep pouring bait questions into HNQ.The worse part is, SE delisted Interpersonal and nerfed Academia and Workspace from HNQ a long time ago because some users were pointing at it on Twitter. Core users riot while management's like, as long as our PR is preserved, we don't care
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@_P_ said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
SE delisted Interpersonal and nerfed Academia and Workspace from HNQ a long time ago
Really? That's how I happened upon this question. I also read a couple of Workplace questions and I think I saw but didn't read one Interpersonal question today.
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@HardwareGeek said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@_P_ said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
SE delisted Interpersonal and nerfed Academia and Workspace from HNQ a long time ago
Really? That's how I happened upon this question. I also read a couple of Workplace questions and I think I saw but didn't read one Interpersonal question today.
Apparently they've changed it again recently. The new changes are in a separate post also linked on that post above.
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@HardwareGeek said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
This person seems likely to wind up here sooner or later.
Just graduated with a master’s degree, but I internalised nothing
I just graduated with a software-engineering master’s degree with a good grade from a top-five university in the UK. I also have a bachelor's in computer science. I always revised just for exams and
TL;DR: Student has masters in software engineering. Got good marks at a top school by studying to the tests, then forgetting everything immediately after taking the exam. By his own admission, he "barely know[s] how to program[.]" Now he's looking for a job.
Sounds bogus to me. You don't get a masters in software engineering from a top 5 school by just "revising" (studying?) for tests, you need to do the homeworks as well, which often include programming.
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@jinpa said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
"revising" (studying?) for tests
My guess is "reviewing". My guess is also the ex-student is not native to the UK, but is from a country where English is an official language, but not a first language for most people, and the dialect has some odd quirks.
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@HardwareGeek That's just a difference in language between the two sides of the Atlantic; studying your notes and textbooks for a test really is called revising here.
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@dkf TIL. I was partly right — dialect with odd quirks.
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@HardwareGeek said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@jinpa said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
"revising" (studying?) for tests
My guess is "reviewing". My guess is also the ex-student is not native to the UK, but is from a country where English is an official language, but not a first language for most people, and the dialect has some odd quirks.
Sounds reasonable. But it reinforces the view that it's a fake, because if he got a bachelor's and a master's from a "top-five" university in one of the three major English-speaking countries, he would have abandoned dialectical usages as described.
Even if he was talking about the top five universities in India, I'm doubtful he could have gotten away without programming. On the other hand, smaller countries, like Sri Lanka, might only have five universities.
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I think he should stop screwing around in a university and instead go out and get a job. The job market for people who are ostensibly software engineers is red hot right now in the UK (it's almost to the point where you can get hired if you have a pulse and don't grope the receptionist on the way into the building), so the getting a job part should be fairly easy. What's more, the job will show why this software engineering stuff matters, which appears to be the one thing he didn't actually learn.
I don't know which university he was at, but I really hope it wasn't ours. Our software engineering course is explicitly practical-heavy to try to stomp out this sort of foolishness.
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Doesn't seem too far fetched, but it's rare that a newly minted graduate is aware of how much they don't actually know. Lots of people just out of school are utterly shit at writing code. They lack, for obvious reasons, real world experience and have only worked on toy problems for the most part. I've met three persons that hit the ground running straight out of school, most others had to be taught how to write unit tests, how to use (and not) source control, and a lot of other basic stuff.
Getting a degree means, for the most part, getting over the huge hump in the beginning of the learning curve of programming. Most of the learning is still to come. Hell, I'm still learning.
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@Carnage said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
toy problems for the most part.
The most complicated piece of software I wrote in college was a calculator that basically (if I did the assignment according to the instructions) supported four functions. Maybe. And, a "jukebox" that used an embedded Windows Media Player control to play two hard-coded files in sequence.
Naturally, I went way above and beyond. My calculator supported everything the Simple view of Windows' calculator, including history log and memory storage. The Jukebox application supported scanning a folder (default to the user's Music folder as specified by the registry) for all known playable types, playlist management including add/remove/reorder, shuffling, repeat one/all, and save/load.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@Carnage said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
toy problems for the most part.
The most complicated piece of software I wrote in college was a calculator that basically (if I did the assignment according to the instructions) supported four functions. Maybe. And, a "jukebox" that used an embedded Windows Media Player control to play two hard-coded files in sequence.
Naturally, I went way above and beyond. My calculator supported everything the Simple view of Windows' calculator, including history log and memory storage. The Jukebox application supported scanning a folder (default to the user's Music folder as specified by the registry) for all known playable types, playlist management including add/remove/reorder, shuffling, repeat one/all, and save/load.
My studies were for game development engineer, and apart from the small and large team projects we had, every bit of code written was a small toy problem. Granted, the toys might be complex, like neural nets, or graphs, but they were very small and contained bit's of code, which entirely side steps the code quality and readability of programming.
I think I could do most of the practical bits of the classes in one week for each class now. A few years after having started working I found some old code from my student days, and it took me and another guy a week of work to produce it, and now I'd say I'd have the code written in a day. And it'd be a lot better as well. And have unit tests. In a language I haven't used before, just to make it a tiny bit fair to student me.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
The most complicated piece of software I wrote in college was a calculator.
The two most interesting pieces of software I wrote in college were a game you could play over the local network and a simple compiler that compiled a toy language to x86 assembly. The former was a software engineering desaster but worked, the latter's code was excellent, but the final stage (IR -> assembly) never actually managed to produce working assembly for half of the test programs and we never figured out why.
In both cases, we weren't allowed to use libraries for the core task and had to write the specification (language / network protocol) ourselves. They were pretty great exercises for me, but it probably depended on whether you managed to choose a good group or a bunch of lazy idiots.
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@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
They were pretty great exercises for me
That sounds fantastic and way above anything I ever saw offered as a class.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
That sounds fantastic and way above anything I ever saw offered as a class.
Both were electives, obviously, but I'm very glad I took them. The game we had to produce for the network protocol design class was very simple (think Tic-tac-toe), but the interoperability test and the resulting emergency bugfix session were very interesting. It's astonishing how much room for interpretation there is in a simple RFC. And the part of the spec I was responsible for was misinterpreted by literally everyone else and I had to change my own code as a result. I learned a valuable lesson that day: I suck at writing technical specifications.
But did your college really not have a practical compiler class? I thought those were pretty common.
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@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
And the part of the spec I was responsible for was misinterpreted by literally everyone
@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
But did your college really not have a practical compiler class? I thought those were pretty common.
I mean, in one class the prof. didn't even care if your java code compiled. So long as your intent was somewhat interpretable as matching the desired result, you got most credit.
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@HardwareGeek said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@dkf TIL. I was partly right — dialect with odd quirks.
American English is, indeed, a dialect with odd quirks.
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@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
It's astonishing how much room for interpretation there is in a simple RFC.
I give you ... the TCP Urgent Data system. Quick: how much urgent data can you reliably transfer in one segment?
The answer is "one octet" because each TCP implementation treats it slightly differently, but at one octet, the differences don't matter.
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The answer is "one octet"
Unless you have a Cisco middlebox, apparently, see section 3.4.*
Why did you make me read that RFC? I already felt like I needed to go home and shower due to the heat and you just made it much, much worse.
*But, arguably, if you use such pieces of shit, you get what you deserve - I've had my own experiences with them breaking simple web applications.
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The topic title confuses me.
Are you suggesting that the person in question is likely to end up working with Microsoft FrontPage, or.?.
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@HardwareGeek ... reminds me of when I learned basics of Java in a week by being paid by a university student to program his end-year school assignment =D
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@sh_code this reminds of a time when I had to "help out" somebody that I "had to help out", whether I wanted it or not (the less said, the better). It was an assignment for a fake course in music, they had to make a soundtrack for a video. The student in question had no intention to "waste their time" in learning how to do it, so I was basically forced to basically compose a song that aligned well with the pictures of the videos they chose. Being a perfectionist, I went far beyond the requirements of the course. The student in question got almost perfect marks for it, and I suspect the reason they didn't get a perfect score was that, when asked how they did it, they replied "I can't remember". The teacher then complimented the student and asked them whether they would be interested in taking part in a music festival.
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@admiral_p you must've been a newbie in paid homework market. An experienced professional would never allow themselves to do a good job.
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@Gąska paid?
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@admiral_p it wasn't paid? Well, that sucks.
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@HardwareGeek reminds me of me just out of college. He should just apply for a graduate job and see how he fairs. Nobody expects much from graduates. It's a given that they need to handheld. Depending on how out of date his course was forgetting everything might be useful. He's just nervous.
@dkf that may apply for junior to mid-tier developers under 45k. People have actually started putting barriers up for positions over that. Considering that I can get in though they're not high enough!
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@DogsB said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Nobody expects much from graduates.
A very sad state of affairs. Some public education facilities did try to keep up with the needs of the industry by partnering with some companies and asking what they actually would like to see the students learn. But they tend to run into problems with: 1. the answer being provided by upper manager without actual clue, and, 2. being accused of supporting private enterprise with public money.
Maybe I should contact the profs of my alma mater, and suggest a separate course in writing parsers for the most common data trasfer file formats. And for a few insane ones maybe, to soften the landing to actual work.
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@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Maybe I should contact the profs of my alma mater, and suggest a separate course in writing parsers for the most common data trasfer file formats. And for a few insane ones maybe, to soften the landing to actual work.
That's actually a great idea. I imagine converting data from one format to another is about 30-50 percent of our jobs. I cannot upvote it enough.
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@DogsB said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@dkf that may apply for junior to mid-tier developers under 45k. People have actually started putting barriers up for positions over that.
Those are usually about requiring showing that you already have relevant experience in industry, and that's normal. People simply don't walk straight out of even a masters course into a senior post, not unless they already had the experience beforehand. But what I said about demand being very high is definitely true anyway; I've seen banner ads promising that sort of thing every morning on my commute. (I think their headline introductory salary is far too high, but that's their problem; they wouldn't be posting it if they weren't very keen.)
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@DogsB said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Maybe I should contact the profs of my alma mater, and suggest a separate course in writing parsers for the most common data trasfer file formats. And for a few insane ones maybe, to soften the landing to actual work.
That's actually a great idea. I imagine converting data from one format to another is about 30-50 percent of our jobs. I cannot upvote it enough.
To true, but far to easy to simplify. Always go with an internal custom format, make sure you can convert to and from any other format you need. This way you don't have to worry about conversions from and to format x to All others, Just format X to custom, then custom to Y. Yes it is two conversions, yes the performance does suffer, but the ease to make any other format compatible far outweighs the performance. Want to add another format, get it to convert to and from your custom and it is now compatible with every other format to and from your system.
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@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Some public education facilities did try to keep up with the needs of the industry by partnering with some companies and asking what they actually would like to see the students learn. But they tend to run into problems with: 1. the answer being provided by upper manager without actual clue, and, 2. being accused of supporting private enterprise with public money.
The trick is to also talk to people about 5 years into their career. We got in touch via our alumni network (and had consultation from an in-house working software engineer too).
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@KattMan said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
To true, but far to easy to simplify.
Sure, we know that. The noobs have to learn, and learning this the practical way is very beneficial as most people trust direct experience more than what they've been told by others.
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@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Maybe I should contact the profs of my alma mater, and suggest a separate course in writing parsers for the most common data trasfer file formats. And for a few insane ones maybe, to soften the landing to actual work.
I occasionally suggest to the students around here that mangling data into the right form is half of the work. They tend to think I'm joking...
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@acrow on the other hand, there is a reason why junior developers cost so little, comparatively. They are expected to learn on the job. (Before you say that what's the point of hiring university graduates, I'll reply that, dunno, ask the companies why they seem to require a degree as a basic condition). And which industry do you focus on? There are lots of IT sectors, each one with different requirements, and within each sector, things are done differently. Tools, languages, approaches, methodologies, etc.
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@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
Maybe I should contact the profs of my alma mater, and suggest a separate course in writing
parsers for the most common data trasfer file formatsfruit sorters. And for a few insane ones maybe, to soften the landing to actual work.
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@HardwareGeek said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
graduated with a first-class software-engineering master’s degree
Well, other people have a first-class diploma from elementary school.
Not so bad...
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@KattMan said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
To true, but far to easy to simplify.
binary_dump.datcan wait until they've successfully parseddata.csv,more_data.csv, andevil_data.csv. So canreal_world_data.kinda_csv.
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There's a front page?
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@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
The answer is "one octet"
Unless you have a Cisco middlebox, apparently, see section 3.4.*
Why did you make me read that RFC? I already felt like I needed to go home and shower due to the heat and you just made it much, much worse.
*But, arguably, if you use such pieces of shit, you get what you deserve - I've had my own experiences with them breaking simple web applications.
Fair point. And sorry for not adding "assuming that the URG flag survives the network" - I work on a protocol-aware deep-packet-inspection UTM that can be configured to do the same thing (except to Telnet and FTP which break if you squelch that flag), so I should have known better.
But I didn't make you read the RFC. That's all on you. ;)
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@admiral_p That's why data parsing and formatting. It's useful for very nearly every field of software engineering.
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@admiral_p said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@acrow on the other hand, there is a reason why junior developers cost so little, comparatively. They are expected to learn on the job. (Before you say that what's the point of hiring university graduates, I'll reply that, dunno, ask the companies why they seem to require a degree as a basic condition). And which industry do you focus on? There are lots of IT sectors, each one with different requirements, and within each sector, things are done differently. Tools, languages, approaches, methodologies, etc.
The degree means that they at least got the basics of logic and syntax mostly out of the way, hopefully. At least a bit of it.
And I've been in various fields, but there really isn't much difference between them. The odd outlier I'd say would be game development, that's pretty far from everything else I've done.
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@Carnage said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@admiral_p said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@acrow on the other hand, there is a reason why junior developers cost so little, comparatively. They are expected to learn on the job. (Before you say that what's the point of hiring university graduates, I'll reply that, dunno, ask the companies why they seem to require a degree as a basic condition). And which industry do you focus on? There are lots of IT sectors, each one with different requirements, and within each sector, things are done differently. Tools, languages, approaches, methodologies, etc.
The degree means that they at least got the basics of logic and syntax mostly out of the way, hopefully. At least a bit of it.
And I've been in various fields, but there really isn't much difference between them. The odd outlier I'd say would be game development, that's pretty far from everything else I've done.I can think of the following fields with different skillsets:
- Embedded development: Lots of C, void pointers and static lists. Memory access is 1 or 2 cycles, including FLASH, which the program is executed from. No OS, unless you jam one into the same executable. Electronics engineering skills are a big plus. Everything is cross-compiled and loaded to the target via HW debugger. Free libraries are scarce, and you'll need to port to your hardware yourself whatever there is. No memory protection. Dynamic memory only if you bring a library for it. Hard real-time.
- Desktop development: Object-orientedness. GUIs. Games. Responsiveness. Soft real-time.
- Server side: You actually need to take into account the system load when 100+ clients connect to your server. Database access patterns. Data access and storage patterns. Dockers and whatnot.
- Massive data: I don't know what exactly you need for this. I don't want to know either, since it's as far from my world as it's possible to get.
If you didn't know, I do Embedded.
I can't actually read what the offered answers in this thread do:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/26634/c-any-clean-way-for-generic-parent-to-get-type-of-childI propably would after reading some kind of primer on modern object-oriented languages and features, but, well,
for now. I'll have to write some server code later this year, to knit a distributed embedded system more tightly together by using a Linux box as the system master, but I'll likely cobble that together in very simple C++ and Qt (which I've used for GUIs before). Since the end product will likely be maintained by someone with more experience in C than C++ also, that may not be a bad thing.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
I work on a protocol-aware deep-packet-inspection UTM that can be configured to do the same thing (except to Telnet and FTP which break if you squelch that flag), so I should have known better.
That's… great to know after I just wrote a short rant about such products. This is not weird at all. Awkward.
I'll just assume you don't work for Riverbed and had no part in creating the buggy device I hate so much.
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@dkf said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
don't grope the receptionist on the way into the building
So that was my problem! Dammit!
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@dfdub said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
I'll just assume you don't work for Riverbed and had no part in creating the buggy device I hate so much.
Good Lord, no. (And the urg-squelch is configurable in my company's device because it breaks protocols.)
On the other hand ... Riverbed does ring a bell. Ah, yes, WAN accelerators. Yeah, the less said about them, the better. They do ... strange things, let's say, to TCP connections.
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@acrow said in Future Front Page Perpetrator?:
@admiral_p That's why data parsing and formatting. It's useful for very nearly every field of software engineering.
Microwave clocks still have to format data, specifically time information, for human readability. ;)
