scottyallen.com

I had a very enlightening conversation with one of my professors, though it was hardly the good sort of enlightenment.

It turns out one of the classes I’m taking this semester, Software Engineering Methods and Tools, is going to largely be a waste of time, and we won’t be learning much I don’t already know. It turns out the first half of the course will be largely an introduction to linux and development in a linux environment (make, cvs, find, grep, standard libraries, etc). And the second half of the course, which gets into testing, performance evalution and debugging, won’t be getting into enough depth to be of use to me.

This is all added to the fact that the funding was cut so severely that they had to drop half (or possibly more) of the lab sessions. So there will only be 6 two hour labs the whole semester. For a course that’s supposed to be largely hands on.

I had hoped to learn extreme programming (pair programming), test driven development, how to develop test harnesses for hard to test systems, and project time and cost estimation. None of which will be covered.

But that isn’t the most annoying part. The most annoying part is that there appears to be no one I could have talked to ahead of time who might have steered me away from this fate. The computer science advisor is useless. The professor for this class said that I’m a rare exception - most students don’t really care what they’re learning, and just want to be told what they need to know to pass the course.

Screw that. I’m here, spending all this time, so I can actually learn something. And not just anything. What I want to learn. But apparently that’s too much to ask.

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