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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I worked with programmers around my junior year and some of them were in classes I was in. I thought they were all playing one-upsmanship when I heard how little time they were spending on homework. 90 minutes, sometimes an hour.

I was a lot faster than my roommate, and after I turned in my homework I’d help him debug (not solve) his. Then I was helping other people. They really did not get debugging. Definitely felt like a missing class. But it helped me out with mentoring later on. When giving people the answer can get you expelled, you have to get pretty good at asking leading questions.

Then I got a real job, and within a semester I was down below 2 hours. We just needed more practice, and lots of it.

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This is why internships and real world experience is so important. A course is 3 in class hours a week over 12-14 weeks typically. After homework and assignments it is ultimately maybe 40-80 hours of content.

Which means you learn more in one month of being on a normal, 40 hour workweek job than you have in an entire semester of one course.

>A course is 3 in class hours a week over 12-14 weeks typically. After homework and assignments it is ultimately maybe 40-80 hours of content.

Huh? I was spending 20+ hours a week on assignments alone in upper level software engineering classes.

Also, internships were required.

Were you the sort of person who responsibly worked a little bit on the assignments over the course of the week/two weeks, or did you carve out an evening to try to get the whole thing done in one or two sittings?

My group did the latter. I think based on what we know now about interruptions, we were likely getting more done per minute than the responsible kids.

Including reading, we might have been doing 15 hours a week sustained, across 2-3 core classes.

But these were the sort of people who got their homework done so they could go back to the ACM office to work on their computer game, or work out how to squeeze a program we all wanted to use into our meager disk space quota.

Anything more than a B was chasing academia over practical knowledge. B- to C+ was optimal.

Not all hours are created equal. This is on the verge of saying “I took 1,000 breaths on my run, so if I do that again, it’s like going for a run.” Just because you’re measuring something, it doesn’t mean that you’re measuring the right thing. You’re just cargo-culting the “formal education is useless” meme.

I believe that software-related college degrees are mainly there to get the horrible first few tens of thousands of lines of code out of people before they go into industry.

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