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> Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. You sorta can. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://m

> Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. You sorta can. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ I've also met grads that basically had a dedicated software engineering class where they learned: What's a package manager, build system, how to compile C++ code (linking and compilation), makefiles, agile, waterfall and source control and a few quality metrics to look out for.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
The tech skills, maybe. But does the course cover stuff like "How to deal with a project manager who has no clue what they're doing", or "How to manage expectations in a customer who is way overenthusiastic about their new idea for a feature", or even "How to deal with Aspy Dave who thinks he's a rockstar 10x coder but actually churns out buggy crap that the rest of the team have to fix". The non-tech skills of how commercial software development actually works in an actual organisation are really important, and the only way of learning them is on the job.
hakfoo 5y ago
I almost feel like this is a place for a corporate onboarding/training process. I'm mentoring a new developer at my firm. He's fresh out of college. His code works on a basic level. The things he's stubbed his toes on: * Naming conventions. We have probably more rules about this than some, but things like branch and commit names matter because we tie them into our issue tracking process. * Strictly reading specifications. We had a couple days rework because he used a different suggested name for something, and it ended up propagating into dozens of class names. * Knowing when and what can be cleaned up. This I can forgive, as it normally waits towards the end of the project and he isn't quite there yet, but when we paired to work on it, there was a lot of leftover baggage. * Bulletproofing/exhaustive coverage. I suspect there's a lot of university projects where "what if the remote server hands us HTTP 418" is answered by "the test service doesn't". * Multiplayer and advanced Git. "The main branch is going to update without you, and eventually there's going to be merge conflicts" and you'll need to merge/rebase was a problem for him, as was dealing with a feature branch with multiple task sub-branches (keeping too many of them open at once is a huge risk for weird merge conflicts and hideous histories when they're finally resolved).

marcus_holmes 5y ago

The tech skills, maybe. But does the course cover stuff like "How to deal with a project manager who has no clue what they're doing", or "How to manage expectations in a customer who is way overenthusiastic about their new idea for a feature", or even "How to deal with Aspy Dave who thinks he's a rockstar 10x coder but actually churns out buggy crap that the rest of the team have to fix". The non-tech skills of how commercial software development actually works in an actual organisation are really important, and the only way of learning them is on the job.

hakfoo 5y ago

I almost feel like this is a place for a corporate onboarding/training process. I'm mentoring a new developer at my firm. He's fresh out of college. His code works on a basic level. The things he's stubbed his toes on: * Naming conventions. We have probably more rules about this than some, but things like branch and commit names matter because we tie them into our issue tracking process. * Strictly reading specifications. We had a couple days rework because he used a different suggested name for something, and it ended up propagating into dozens of class names. * Knowing when and what can be cleaned up. This I can forgive, as it normally waits towards the end of the project and he isn't quite there yet, but when we paired to work on it, there was a lot of leftover baggage. * Bulletproofing/exhaustive coverage. I suspect there's a lot of university projects where "what if the remote server hands us HTTP 418" is answered by "the test service doesn't". * Multiplayer and advanced Git. "The main branch is going to update without you, and eventually there's going to be merge conflicts" and you'll need to merge/rebase was a problem for him, as was dealing with a feature branch with multiple task sub-branches (keeping too many of them open at once is a huge risk for weird merge conflicts and hideous histories when they're finally resolved).