re: "Things I learned about Software while NOT in College" by Scott Reynolds

Bill — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:20:08 GMT

Not surprisingly, I agree 100% with each of your comments Andy - great minds think alike

re: "Things I learned about Software while NOT in College" by Scott Reynolds

Andy — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:41:16 GMT

In school:

1.) Whether something is correct or incorrect depends on the instructors interpretation of the subject matter not the actual correct answer.

2.) Professors base a lot of things on their opinions not any basis in fact.

3.) Math professors tend to be a lot more grounded and without bias then say, English Lit professors.

After school and after more than 10 years in the GIS, CAD and embedded systems industry:

1.) You will use every piece of Geometry, Trig, and Calculus you ever learned in school and still need to learn more.

2.) You will need to use every trick you ever learned for speeding up calculations in school because geometry is hard and if you don't know this stuff your software can literally take days to execute instead of seconds.

3.) Understanding how computers work is essential, especially where it concerns floating and fixed point math.

4.) You will use C, C++, and Assembler nearly every day of your career so you really need to understand them.

5.) Walk through every piece of a new systems design with as many people as you can find and be ready to listen to criticism because mistakes you don't fix at the design stage will become incredibly difficult to fix once the system has been coded.

6.) Developers who work on other types of systems such as medical, financial, web, etc. are never going to get what you do and won't get why you think certain things like pointers are important for developers to know. But you can learn a ton from them on how to design good user interfaces.

7.) Things developers think are intuitive are generally completely opposite from what a user will think is intuitive.

8.) Code like you will have to maintain it after totally forgetting what it does and how it does it. Because you will.

9.) You will very likely end up going back to school to take more math even if you minored in it.

10.) Keep the contact names and numbers of your math professors it can be a life saver.