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Please colleges, please make computer science/software engineering students take at least one course where they have to write essays to pass the course.

• mettamage 11y ago
  They don't, unfortunately. In my case I was very lucky. One of the first things I did was Google about what programmers would do -- as opposed to programming which I was scared of in the beginning days -- and I found out about Joel Spolsky very early on in my studies. Getting a bit of breadth about the culture and more about the philosophies and theoretical underpinning, from various writers, has been quite helpful to me. This is what he said: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html You may guess what his number one tip is ;) My number 1 'hack' that I learned from these classes is to eliminate every unnecessary word and be as short and concise as possible. That way, I make fewer mistakes, get my point faster across and I communicate more clearly in general since there's no risk of being long winded. I never do it in HN comments though, it takes a lot of time.
  • falsedan 11y ago
    My number one hack is to take the conclusion from the third paragraph/wherever and, since it's the most important thing to communicate, move it to be the first part (in front of all the tedious "here's the background on the problem we were trying to solve").