Where’s the course on managing your reaction when the client starts moving the goal posts on a project that you didn’t specify well enough (or at all), because you’re a young eager developer without any scars yet?
Back in the 90s, this was actually a sneaky part of Dartmouth's CS23 Software Engineering course. At least half your grade came from a 5-person group software project which took half a semester. The groups were chosen for you, of course.
The professors had a habit of sending out an email one week before the due date (right before finals week) which contained several updates to the spec.
It was a surprisingly effective course.
(Dartmouth also followed this up with a theory course that often required writing about 10 pages of proofs per week. I guess they wanted a balance of practice and theory, which isn't the worst way to teach CS.)
In uni we had a semester long group project with the stronger coders as project leaders. Group leaders controlled pass/fail for the group members and vice versa. After the leaders put together project plans for their teams and everyone was supposed to start working WHOOPSIE reorg and all the leaders got put on random teams and new people got "promoted" into leader (of groups they didn't create the plan for). If the project didn't work at the end the entire group failed.
I've never been taught anything more clearly than the lessons from that class.
Shit I was thinking about exactly the same thing: professor deliberately change requirements at last week to mess up the students and give them a bit of taste of true work.
My uni kind of had that course! They just didn't tell us what it was going to be ahead of time and it was horrendous. We all absolutely hated the professor but it was required to graduate so we all came up with various coping strategies and at the very end he said "congratulations this is what the real world is like!"
(I didn't believe him at the time, but in some ways he really didn't go far enough...)
ekidd|4 months ago
The professors had a habit of sending out an email one week before the due date (right before finals week) which contained several updates to the spec.
It was a surprisingly effective course.
(Dartmouth also followed this up with a theory course that often required writing about 10 pages of proofs per week. I guess they wanted a balance of practice and theory, which isn't the worst way to teach CS.)
collingreen|4 months ago
I've never been taught anything more clearly than the lessons from that class.
markus_zhang|4 months ago
Glad that someone actually did this.
lexicality|4 months ago
(I didn't believe him at the time, but in some ways he really didn't go far enough...)
hotstickyballs|4 months ago
dfex|4 months ago
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t|4 months ago