Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe [Updated]
upstart writes:
[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
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