<p>Is it ok for old people to interject? I have a few thoughts here.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>A lot of the “silly theoretical junk” they taught me in Comp Sci classes… ended up making a lot of sense years later in real life. Even the little stuff: When you have a tight deadline to edit a bunch of crappy spaghetti code left by your long-since-gone predecessor, you suddenly become a zealot for inline documentation and consistent naming schemes.</p></li>
<li><p>You know those group projects you looooove so much in your classes? :rolleyes: Real life is like that. Pretty much all the time, unless you spend your whole life as a code monkey in a closet. Sorry. Really sorry.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>On the other hand, all “tests” are open book, open notes, open neighbors. And yeah, the earlier comment about sprints vs marathon is a very good way to look at it. College and real life are different kinds of hard.</p>
<p>Thank you!! When I was a TA in grad school, that was the thing I kept trying to convince my students of… if your colleagues can’t read and follow your calculations in real life, they’re going to call you in and yell at you for ten minutes. Clear handwriting, writing down ALL the steps, and commenting extensively in any code you write is going to minimize the amount of trouble you get into later on with your colleagues and bosses. </p>
<p>When I graded problem sets, if I could read a student’s calculations and their answer was wrong, I would follow the calcs through, find the error, carry the rest of the calcs through, and give them most of the credit that they’d earned. If I couldn’t read or follow a student’s calculations and their answer was wrong, I’d have little choice but to count it as wrong. (I had one student whose diabolical objective was to fit an entire problem set onto one sheet of paper… Pure evil!)</p>
<p>Real life, the reason being that companies demand how billable you are to your projects/ clients. I wish they taught us that in school, I had to find out the hard way when every week at work, my ex boss would have to talk to me about OVERHEAD. I hated it, and it’s a constant drag how you have to sell yourself just to get a project work number to fill in your timesheet.</p>
<p>So yea, real world is harder compared to school. I actually thought most of the eng courses were actually fun and interesting. The best line ever from my ex boss, “You’re not finding enough work, we need to find you some work to do, so you can be billable.”</p>
<p>Chargeability gives me stomach ulcers and nightmares. My old company used to publish everyone’s annual chargeability. Non-administrative low-chargers would be open to nationwide mocking.</p>
<p>I charged 1 hour of overhead to my company once as an intern, and I got interrogated! My hourly rate my was probably $15 at the time, and my multiplier was only around 2.5… maybe even less! Pretty much everything imaginable gets charged to the client. To use our copier/printer, we had to input what project to charge the cost to!</p>