On 11/14/2011 12:00 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> On 14/11/2011 05:35 PM, Warp wrote:
>
>> I suppose I should be (and I *am*) very glad to be, at least at the
>> moment, in a job where I get to solve and implement real, interesting
>> programming problems (such as problems related to geometry,
>> combinatorics,
>> low and high level program optimization, and so on) with immediate
>> visible
>> results and payoff (namely: a playable computer game), where I make the
>> programming decisions and design.
>
> I love how when I did my "computer science" degree at uni, the entire
> course was predicated around the idea that you will be writing large
> enterprise systems which consist of a database backend, and a Java or
> HTML front-end, possibly with some middleware in the center. Because,
> seriously, that's all there is, isn't it? It's not like anybody writes
> device drivers, or industrial control software, or computer games, or
> compilers and interpretters, or anything that isn't an enterprise CRUD
> system...
>
> ...oh, wait. :-P
>
Sounds like you went to damn near the same place I did. Note however 
that there where three other courses:

Electronic Engineering Technology- The people expected to write device 
drivers, and build shit that used something vaguely microprocessor like.
Electronics - The guys that built simple shit that didn't do more than 
use basic circuits, like switches.
Telecommunications - Where the people that couldn't, for some 
incomprehensible reasons "grasps" databases, or programming, and found 
all the stuff in the 'Computer Information Systems' course, "to hard!", 
despite the fact that, at the time, we didn't even need to deal with 
middleware, Java, HTML, or all that other stuff, just Dummy Terminals, 
some basic commands to the mainframe's file stores, to execute jobs, and 
COBOL, the simplest, stupidest, and most "human friendly", in terms of 
syntax, of the languages, at that time, or likely since (for some reason 
making them understandable by humans makes them useless for computers... 
lol)

We started out with the largest class they had ever had, like 60-70 
people, and by the third trimester where down to like 20, of which maybe 
12-14 graduated. Many of the rest ended up in telecom, where I presume 
they struggled to grasp how to dial modems.

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