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I had a course about queue theory in my SWE degree. I left the course with a deep sense of dread because I knew most people studying CS and SWE in other univers

I had a course about queue theory in my SWE degree. I left the course with a deep sense of dread because I knew most people studying CS and SWE in other universities would be oblivious to such a fundamental piece of knowledge. Basically everything that processes data has a queue attached to it, from your router to your scheduler. Not knowing anything about queue theory is such an insult to the profession of SWE. It's like being a Mech engineer and not knowing about control of dynamic systems.

OJFord 4y ago
Why did you think you knew that? I'm also one of your supposed few to have studied it, I never thought that. The dread should have been that most companies/teams won't care, won't engineer on that level, will just set it up however and make it bigger/faster/more-consumed if it's too slow.
- setr 4y ago
  In my uni, the class was more or less unadvertised and the professor largely ignored — you had to go out of your way to take it (I was actively looking for poorly rated professors, because I figured they were usually rated such because they graded hard… which probably meant they cared more). When I tried to google the subject/code examples afterwards, I largely only found textbooks and one-off blog posts. Also a lot of GitHub repos with names like CS550… Only place I’ve seen it referenced since that class was: 1. HN periodically 2. A YouTube documentary about Disneyland fast pass queues 3. A business optimization consultancy Ultimately, a pretty niche subject area AFAICT. But implementing a fairly efficient queuing simulation seems to be pretty easy, and the subject seems to be stupid powerful and broadly applicable… so I’ve never understood why it’s not more discussed
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Compared to what, as if say information theory comes up (explicitly) all the time? Seems like you could say that about any more theoretically oriented course.

OJFord 4y ago

Why did you think you knew that? I'm also one of your supposed few to have studied it, I never thought that. The dread should have been that most companies/teams won't care, won't engineer on that level, will just set it up however and make it bigger/faster/more-consumed if it's too slow.

setr 4y ago
In my uni, the class was more or less unadvertised and the professor largely ignored — you had to go out of your way to take it (I was actively looking for poorly rated professors, because I figured they were usually rated such because they graded hard… which probably meant they cared more). When I tried to google the subject/code examples afterwards, I largely only found textbooks and one-off blog posts. Also a lot of GitHub repos with names like CS550… Only place I’ve seen it referenced since that class was: 1. HN periodically 2. A YouTube documentary about Disneyland fast pass queues 3. A business optimization consultancy Ultimately, a pretty niche subject area AFAICT. But implementing a fairly efficient queuing simulation seems to be pretty easy, and the subject seems to be stupid powerful and broadly applicable… so I’ve never understood why it’s not more discussed
- OJFord 4y ago
  Compared to what, as if say information theory comes up (explicitly) all the time? Seems like you could say that about any more theoretically oriented course.