Why C Students Are More Successful After Graduation | Hacker News Reader

Why C Students Are More Successful After Graduation

medium.com

7 pointsdicemoose9 comments

This piece appears to beg the question - is there any evidence that C students are more successful after graduation? Or that students who get a C grade are doing any of the things he talks about? Or is this a weak justification for why his own grades were poor and perhaps the average C student is actually a stressed out kid who is working a minimum wage job to help pay expenses and following every rule they can find/spending 40 hours a week drinking and watching football?

I think there's a certain category. I was an A and C student depending on how useful I expected a course to be. I also took much harder courses than my peers and social engineered my way into honors classes (I sucked at calculus, but this journal filled with abstract algebra I did for funsies says I can probably do honors analysis of algorithms). I think my in-major GPA ended up over a full point higher than my general GPA.

From the article: The world doesn’t need obedient and compliant factory workers anymore. The world needs artists, creatives, hackers, and innovators. We’re done with apathetically living out our lives in school and at our 9-to-5 jobs. We’re sick of it. We’re done with it.

IMO, this is why our software is riddled with bugs, slow and generally low quality. Seriously, use the latest Facebook app on the latest iPhone 6s device over a gigabit wifi connection and watch how it lags and bugs out in multiple tiny ways. Software engineering has forgotten the engineering part. Our software should be as solid as the golden gate bridge, sturdy and solid for a 100 years. I believe it's the rigid 9 to 5 discipline that brings that sort of reliability, instead of treating devs like art college students.

I think programming can be engineering (in the applied problem solving sense) and/or art. I think Facebook probably employs both. And I think obedience is still valued, although it is less likely to be the path to an abundant life. It still offers decent downside protection.

> Our software should be as solid as the golden gate bridge, sturdy and solid for a 100 years.

Not the Bay Bridge?

>IMO, this is why our software is riddled with bugs, slow and generally low quality. Seriously, use the latest Facebook app on the latest iPhone 6s device over a gigabit wifi connection and watch how it lags and bugs out in multiple tiny ways. Software engineering has forgotten the engineering part. Our software should be as solid as the golden gate bridge, sturdy and solid for a 100 years. I believe it's the rigid 9 to 5 discipline that brings that sort of reliability, instead of treating devs like art college students.

Sounds like a lot of BS to justify your existence. People built bridges before they had the knowledge of physics to understand why they didn't fall over. Software hasn't even existed 100 years. Get over yourself.

I fail to understand how you turned my comment into commentary on me. I work in the similar free/flexible timing, beer in the open-plan office type of environment. And I am sick of it and the low-quality crap that everyone in the industry is seemingly producing.

Just because software hasn't existed for 100 years doesn't mean we will make stuff that falls apart after a month.

>People built bridges before they had the knowledge of physics to understand why they didn't fall over.

Yeah, and they did not say "I'm sick of trying to learn physics. Instead let's continue making rickety bridges that fall down after a gust of wind."

They built bridges, sure, but they were usually over-engineered stone behemoths over relatively small rivers that didn't exactly require a structural engineer to calculate loads on. Pile on some rocks, arrange them in non-stupid way that won't fall apart under stress, throw some mud in the cracks between the rocks -- it's a bridge!

Anyone can build a bridge that stands. The trick is in building a bridge that barely stands, or suspension bridge that spans over a mile on strands of steel, with known tolerances to earthquakes and storms. You can't build the Golden Gate bridge without physics.

Anyone can throw together some software, put it on the Internet, and keep throwing more AWS money at it as needed. But software engineering is about constantly finding better ways, running simulations to model loads, using clever properties of math and information theory to reduce required resources and building code to do what's required of it as efficiently as possible.

Maybe the problem is that Facebook hires the students with straight A's, while the "artists, creatives, hackers, and innovators" feel stifled being a cog in an ad machine and stike out on their own instead?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com