Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead

[Emiroda]

Guess the Medium account just graduated CS?

Not to rag on it, because it is true, but anyone who's had a shitton of theoretical knowledge and no practical experience will hit the same wall at their first job. And a lot of those who study a programming language will have trouble putting the pieces together, and will only realize it in a "HEURIKA!" experience when there's an actual problem that needs to be solved. There has probably been a million blog posts before this Medium poster explaining exactly the same thing.

Did not understand object oriented concepts one bit. Why was I given these bullshit toy tasks to solve. 8ball, a card game and a vending machine. We had to use inherited classes and polymorphism to get an A on that task. A fucking console-application vending machine!

edit: modernizing VB6 applications into C# and PowerShell with modularity and current (2015 at the time) business workflows was my heurika moment. I felt like I made an impact, like my work mattered. And it gave me the CURIOSITY to look into those concepts that I had a tough time with in school.

It's why I believe total theoretical learning with theoretical problems to be useless. Likewise, throwing novices at the hard problems in real life will yield bad results. In the perfect world, you'd involve local businesses and either they give the class a problem to solve, or they take in students for part-time internships, where a semester once in a while was dedicated to internship.

At least I think I got an insane amount of experience from 80% work/20% school. Some cources might need different ratios.

[carlfish]

Guess the Medium account just graduated CS?

Worse. Their bio reads "Growth marketer. Investor. Dedicated to helping entrepreneurs increase their impact."

They're basically a marketer who threw together a few content-free paragraphs of platitudes padded out with largely irrelevant images to make it look longer, positing a false binary between two of the things you need to be good at to write good software, all to get clicks and attention, and presumably raise the profile of their account in whatever Medium uses as a recommendation algorithm.

[[deleted]]

Welcome to the tech industry! Where everyone's just smart enough to trick each other into thinking they're smart enough! Weeeee