I tend to be leery of any claims like this. It would be nice to be able to pump infinite knowledge into students in one course, but that's not realistic.
The implicit claim behind such a statement is: X should be a topic covered in all software engineering courses, and Y is the best explanation of it. And that is a statement quite easy to punch holes in, regardless of how much you like Y.
In this case: most intro SE courses need to teach things like good commenting and committing practice. Anything architectural is beyond most undergrads.
It's completely true. I do recruiting for non-tech roles (sales, marketing, design). A few years ago, I'd visit a foreign university, and they'd see USA on my badge, and would start flocking to me. Now all I get is heckling about sexism and stealing people's data. We really need to clean up our act.
To be a statistician is to ignore experience. I once interviewed someone who was a statistics major. When I asked him a performance optimization question, the first thing he told me is that he'd write a program to compute the standard deviation of running time. He could've solved it in two minutes just by running the thing. No hire.
I think it's a pretty good idea actually, because with standard deviations (and means, of course) you can run statistical tests to make sure your improvements are statistically significant and not due to chance. I hope the candidate had a chance to explain themselves before he got no-hired.
The candidate is probably now happily working under a manager who doesn’t complain “why are you using your skills? Just [do the simplest thing that occurs to me], you idiot.”
Does anybody else find that people boasting about their "hires or no hires" a) come off as showing off, b) most of times are in the wrong end of the decision?
We can comment on why we think a practice is bad -- as in, with arguments. Not about how we ditched some candidate because they followed it.
I taught gifted education at a prestigious middle school for five years. Over 300 kids came through my classroom during that time.
I saw it all. Seizures. Fistfights. One girl was pretty sure there were secret messages from the principal in the tests I gave. Lots of them started taking drugs early too.
The culmination happened in the Fall of 2012, when one girl convinced her friends that, if they killed themselves, they'd wake up already graduated from college, with school behind them. Luckily, they didn't succeed. And so, in a class of 30 people, I had 6 out and in a mental hospital.
I used to go to a gifted education class once a week when I was around 13 years old.
Probably half the class or more had some form of condition, Autism, ADHD, depression, etc.
Looking back at it now, I don't think it was the case that gifted people are generally "mad". I'm a fairly normal person, and so were a lot of other people in the class. I think that rather, it was that these kids didn't integrate well into conventional education, but this gifted education class was very understanding and accepting of people's "quirks", and had a much more open learning environment where people could grow in their own way. I ended up there because I struggled with the structured nature of normal school.
I've met plenty of people over the years who could be considered gifted (in this case, top 5% IQ), most of them are completely normal and probably just dealt with the overly structured nature of normal school.
People rely on fingerprints to provide proof of identity. But there's not really that much variation in fingers, and fingerprints have a high false positive rate. Fingerprints are going to go the way of the polygraph, and get banned from court.
Yeah, the author of the article makes some absolute statements that might have been believed a few years ago, but which no longer hold any scientific validity.
Which makes me question the whole thing, to be honest.
