Computer Science Programs - Joel Spolsky Saves Me Some Effort

Ever since my friend Elton made a post about what he wished he had learned in college, I have been meaning to make my own post about my experiences at UIUC, er, I mean, ILLINOIS. I don't disagree with the things he wishes CS programs would teach, though I do disagree with the value of the education I received in college. While Elton seems to have enjoyed his time at UT and done well, the three years I spent at UIUC were the most miserable of my life so far. As I often find myself explaining to people today, there is surprisingly little overlap between the skills required to be a good software engineer and the things they teach you as an undergrad in what is supposedly one of the top 5 computer science programs in the country. My classes there were far more about obtaining a pretty piece of paper to hang on my wall than preparing to enter the workforce. This was exemplified by the CS grad student I met who appeared to be incapable of writing "Hello World" in C if his life depended on it.

Anyway, today I was going through my RSS feeds and found Joel Spolsky's post on the subject, and he hits it on the head. Let's teach our students Scheme! It's so functional and elegant! Nobody in industry uses it, but that's because they're all unsophisticated heathens! One of my colleagues once remarked on my zeal for producing a quality product by saying that "If you ignore a bug long enough, Matt will fix it." Apparently if I delay a blog post long enough, Joel Spolsky will write it.

While I'm on the subject of Joel Spolsky, however, I need to take exception to something he said in his post on "Duct Tape Programmers":

Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick. They have to be good enough programmers to ship code, and we'll forgive them if they never write a unit test, or if they xor the "next" and "prev" pointers of their linked list into a single DWORD to save 32 bits, because they're pretty enough, and smart enough, to pull it off.

As a member of the team which recently became the not-so-proud owner of GDI and GDI+, I will say that if you do a crazy what-the-eff-is-he-doing "optimization" like munging bits in a pointer and then fail to supply any unit tests for the poor bastard who has to maintain your code after you run off to work on the Next Big Thing, then you deserve to be fired. Or shot. Maybe both.