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As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program. There was only one professor and course that I still remembe

As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program. There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto. Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacting with previous phase code). Here's the kicker: After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it. Few of us that had real-world working experience loved the course and flourished in it. This is what we are training for! This is what programming is like! You are taking real code and building a real thing with it! About 250 other students signed a petition to the Dean on how this is unfair and awful and they will not put up with it. They were just too used to / spoiled by 16 years of 5 assignments per semester with abstract, entirely separate questions of 1.a), 1.b), 1.c), etc. All I could think of - if you did not like this course, you are about to not enjoy next 4-5 decades of your life :D Other than this one course, I can say that I'm a prolific, enthusiastic, life-long learner, and my university experience was the absolute dumps - it was far less about learning, and far more about bureaucratic hoops and artificial constraints and restrictions. I was top of the class in some hard courses (generative compilers etc), mid-pack in the some of meh courses, but in retrospective, my life opened up when I was done with academia and could work and learn in the 'real world'.

bogdanu 4y ago
Wow, your professor had an amazing idea! I wonder why isn't this strategy more common in college classes.
bobwaycott 4y ago
Hats off to your prof. This is such a brilliant idea for how to teach, anchored in a solid reflection of what “doing the job” is like day-to-day outside the academic context.
yosito 4y ago
> you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it Genius idea! Though if my professors did this, I may have been scared away from a career in programming
jcranmer 4y ago
There are a few issues with this kind of assignment. The first issue is that it's really hell on the TAs with all of the administrative work needed to do the swapping between phases. Software engineering is already one of the more annoying classes to TA, and this makes it even less palatable. The bigger issue is that, on the basis of fairness, you grade in later phases is very heavily dependent on factors that are outside of your control. If you get someone's code who just didn't complete the assignment--that is probably going to happen once a semester--you are going to be at a disadvantage. Even if there is an option to appeal to the TAs and get the unacceptable code base replaced with an acceptable one, that's still likely to be a few days' worth of work lost learning the codebase, discovering its incompleteness, and now you have to start over again. I'll also point out that it's not exactly real-world experience. It is extremely rare that someone will be dumped on a codebase without a prior author remaining on to help them ramp up on the code.
- haskellandchill 4y ago
  > It is extremely rare that someone will be dumped on a codebase without a prior author remaining on to help them ramp up on the code. what? I must be living a rare life.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Hahahaha. Most of the times the author has moved on a long time ago.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Yeah, that statement was the only thing that stuck out to me in an, otherwise, pretty good writeup that I mostly agree with. The only times I can think of where the previous author was able to help was either during onboarding (where you are expected to be given smaller-scope tasks with the context of that code being predefined for you) or during work on certain specific singular projects as a team. But at any large big tech company, you are probably gonna be jumping around more than a few different codebases (more often than not, large and being worked on for years), even if you work on a singular team/product. And most of the time, you are expected to figure as much as possible on your own, only reaching out to the people when you get stuck or encounter a specific issue. Other than that, you are expected to be able to build at least a janky proof of concept with as little help as possible. Most of the time, the help I sharply needed was rather targeted and not really related to the code itself overall. It would be something that is kind of extremely difficult to guess on your own without it being explicitly told (aside from docs/code comments), things like "everything looks fine, but I get stuck at this auth step, what's wrong there?" - "oh yeah, you gotta auth as a part of this specific group, so you need to be added to this security group in this config file". I am not trying to say that i am some genius and can get the structure and overall mental model of how a codebase works all on my own easily, only with the specific "gotchas" (like the ones mentioned in a paragraph above) giving me issues. Not at all. The only way I can mentally get a structure of the codebase and how the whole system works and operates (even as a rough/simplified model) is by looking at the design docs/documentation (very helpful, but far from sufficient on its own, more like a supplementary material of variable quality) and, most importantly, making small code changes and debugging the code using breakpoints to see how it all flows and where. Imo, understanding code through debugging and reading a lot into the code is an irreplaceable step for understanding a section of any significantly-sized codebase.
bcrosby95 4y ago
My software engineering teacher did something similar. We had a giant group project that had to be worked on by the whole class. He split the class into 5 groups of 5, and we divided the work by group, and groups had to work together to integrate with each other.
x86x87 4y ago
> Here's the kicker: After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it. This is hilarious and is a good example of how sw engineering works in the real world. Love it.
johndough 4y ago
> After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. I'd expect that most students would just "rewrite" the code they received from the other team and replace it with their own.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I'm sure that various strategies for gaming the system were anticipated and prohibited.
corbin 4y ago
> About 250 other students signed a petition to the Dean on how this is unfair and awful and they will not put up with it. That behaviour by the students disgusts me.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  It explains how we get the state of the profession we have these days.

bogdanu 4y ago

Wow, your professor had an amazing idea! I wonder why isn't this strategy more common in college classes.

bobwaycott 4y ago

Hats off to your prof. This is such a brilliant idea for how to teach, anchored in a solid reflection of what “doing the job” is like day-to-day outside the academic context.

yosito 4y ago

> you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it Genius idea! Though if my professors did this, I may have been scared away from a career in programming

jcranmer 4y ago

There are a few issues with this kind of assignment. The first issue is that it's really hell on the TAs with all of the administrative work needed to do the swapping between phases. Software engineering is already one of the more annoying classes to TA, and this makes it even less palatable. The bigger issue is that, on the basis of fairness, you grade in later phases is very heavily dependent on factors that are outside of your control. If you get someone's code who just didn't complete the assignment--that is probably going to happen once a semester--you are going to be at a disadvantage. Even if there is an option to appeal to the TAs and get the unacceptable code base replaced with an acceptable one, that's still likely to be a few days' worth of work lost learning the codebase, discovering its incompleteness, and now you have to start over again. I'll also point out that it's not exactly real-world experience. It is extremely rare that someone will be dumped on a codebase without a prior author remaining on to help them ramp up on the code.

haskellandchill 4y ago
> It is extremely rare that someone will be dumped on a codebase without a prior author remaining on to help them ramp up on the code. what? I must be living a rare life.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Hahahaha. Most of the times the author has moved on a long time ago.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Yeah, that statement was the only thing that stuck out to me in an, otherwise, pretty good writeup that I mostly agree with. The only times I can think of where the previous author was able to help was either during onboarding (where you are expected to be given smaller-scope tasks with the context of that code being predefined for you) or during work on certain specific singular projects as a team. But at any large big tech company, you are probably gonna be jumping around more than a few different codebases (more often than not, large and being worked on for years), even if you work on a singular team/product. And most of the time, you are expected to figure as much as possible on your own, only reaching out to the people when you get stuck or encounter a specific issue. Other than that, you are expected to be able to build at least a janky proof of concept with as little help as possible. Most of the time, the help I sharply needed was rather targeted and not really related to the code itself overall. It would be something that is kind of extremely difficult to guess on your own without it being explicitly told (aside from docs/code comments), things like "everything looks fine, but I get stuck at this auth step, what's wrong there?" - "oh yeah, you gotta auth as a part of this specific group, so you need to be added to this security group in this config file". I am not trying to say that i am some genius and can get the structure and overall mental model of how a codebase works all on my own easily, only with the specific "gotchas" (like the ones mentioned in a paragraph above) giving me issues. Not at all. The only way I can mentally get a structure of the codebase and how the whole system works and operates (even as a rough/simplified model) is by looking at the design docs/documentation (very helpful, but far from sufficient on its own, more like a supplementary material of variable quality) and, most importantly, making small code changes and debugging the code using breakpoints to see how it all flows and where. Imo, understanding code through debugging and reading a lot into the code is an irreplaceable step for understanding a section of any significantly-sized codebase.

bcrosby95 4y ago

My software engineering teacher did something similar. We had a giant group project that had to be worked on by the whole class. He split the class into 5 groups of 5, and we divided the work by group, and groups had to work together to integrate with each other.

x86x87 4y ago

> Here's the kicker: After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it. This is hilarious and is a good example of how sw engineering works in the real world. Love it.

johndough 4y ago

> After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. I'd expect that most students would just "rewrite" the code they received from the other team and replace it with their own.

DangitBobby 4y ago
I'm sure that various strategies for gaming the system were anticipated and prohibited.

corbin 4y ago

> About 250 other students signed a petition to the Dean on how this is unfair and awful and they will not put up with it. That behaviour by the students disgusts me.

Aeolun 4y ago
It explains how we get the state of the profession we have these days.