I'm so glad I studied something other than programming, because I taught myself coding. College taught me important life lessons, especially one involving lawyers. I was already working as a freelance programmer and it was my second study (first one was sys admin on a practical level, because I was lazy at school because of gaming haha).

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baq 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Coding is something you can’t learn at the university, you have to do it yourself. Uni classes just make you do it.

Software engineering however is so vast there is very profound wisdom to be learned that you won’t discover much later in your career that would make your solutions so much better had you known them (dear undergrads, pay attention at systems 101, it’s worth it) and you also have an opportunity to learn subjects that would otherwise be very expensive to self-teach (eternally grateful for the fully equipped ethernet laboratory, it’s been almost two decades and the knowledge is still very relevant.)

	▲	eastbound 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Coding is something you can’t learn at the university, you have to do it yourself Yes, but I have a great divide with people who can’t draw UML on a whiteboard. Same length of studies, and yet it takes double the time to agree on what’s to build. They start, and after 3 code reviews I ask them “So where is this abstraction we’ve talked about?” and they say “It’s planned, I’ll do it at the end” and that’s when I know they’ve understood nothing. The first two employees caught me off guard with implementing the instances instead of the pattern, but for the third, I made it a requirement to start with this. Lack of abstraction and lack of UML language to express it, is definitely an impediment for a good developer. (Come the “but you said same length of studies”, so, for those guys: Imagine slaving away with a 5-year bootcamp with no sleep where, at the end, you think you know coding, but you can’t write a treeview where every node is of a different type and calls different implementations — it’s that simple, but in the end, it’s not done).