> Plus, I have yet to see the evidence that colleges provide this virtuous yet intangible quality of non-economically beneficial "wholesome" education. The big

> Plus, I have yet to see the evidence that colleges provide this virtuous yet intangible quality of non-economically beneficial "wholesome" education. The biggest performance dilemma I noticed upon entering college is basic literacy. I saw most people reading at a 9th grade level, which is average for most Americans, and struggle to write a 2 page paper. That 2 page paper was hardly competent once written. The problem was so pronounced that in order to be awarded graduation of a bachelor's degree you had to take and pass a writing competency test at any time during your undergraduate education. In the real world, as a software developer, the biggest barrier I see to the success of many developers is basic literacy. I see so many people who cannot communicate at a professional level. They struggle to reason about the problems they encounter and struggle further to put their thoughts into words that a make sense to an outside party. Most developers I have ever worked with spend their entire careers struggling with a variety of concerns that ultimately (when you remove the bullshit and excuses) boil down to struggles of basic code literacy. I suspect we have all encountered this when everything is an argument of code style, spaces vs tabs, OOP vs functional, and so forth. Code literacy is the difference between thinking in terms of algebra (instructions) versus thinking in terms of calculus (process). When you are literate you form visions of what you want and simply build the vision accordingly. As somebody who rewrote their personal application from scratch last year (about 40,000 lines of code with minimal boilerplate) while also working for two separate employers and having a spouse and kids I really don't have patience for people who fill their time with literacy bullshit. As somebody currently deployed with the time military to a conflict zone this is the thing I dread most about returning to the corporate world. Holy shit people. Pick up a damn book and read. How you communicate will influence how you write code.