Why you don't learn how to write programs in university

A while back some Ministry of Education officials visited Google and were wondering how to revamp the 'A'-level Computer Science syllabus. I think the viewpoint that the software engineers had were that school never taught us software engineering. This article from Joel (of Joel on Software fame) articulates this point nicely:

I have some limited experience with this, having worked with a group of Rose-Hulman students over the course of their final year project. We let them pick their own schedule, and, of course, they put everything off until the last minute and produced something that was incomplete. The typical CS assignment expects students to write the “interesting” part of the code (in the academic sense of the word). The other 90% of the work that it takes to bring code up to the level of “useful, real-world code” is never expected from undergrads, because it’s not “interesting” to fix bugs and deal with real-world conditions, and because most CS faculty have never worked in the real world and have almost no idea what it takes to create software that can survive an encounter with users.

-Joel Spolsky, Capstone projects and time management

In Challenging Times, the Tide Changes

Geeks are So In

In the early 1960s when he was choosing a career, Professor Chamberlin recalled, technical people were respected and well paid. Money, he said, was part of the equation. “But the bigger part of the motivation for me,” he said, “was that I would be doing exciting and important work and that my contributions would be appreciated.”

--With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? [nytimes.com]

The universities in Singapore have release information regarding the grade profile of students entering each course of study. [NTU] [NUS] [SMU]

A comparison between common courses at the various universities at the 10th percentile (letter grades are for GCE A-Level grade combinations, and floating point numbers are the polytechnic diploma GPAs):

Course	NTU(H2/H1, GPA)	NUS	SMU
Accountancy	AAB/B, 3.71	AAA/B, 3.64	ABB/A, 3.60
Business	AAB/B, 3.63	AAB/B, 3.50	ABB/B, 3.49
Economics	ABB/B, 3.48	BBC/C, 3.39	BBB/B, 3.30
Law	-	AAA/A	AAA/B
Information Systems, NTU Comp Eng, Computing (IS)	BCC/C, 3.38	BCC/B, 3.54	BCC/B, 3.16
Social Sciences, Psy, Socio	BCC/B, 3.39	BBC/C, 3.39	BBC/B, 3.28

Reproduced from [Jay Lim's Blog]

Some observations: Computer Science/Engineering has the one of the lowest admission cut-offs, except when considering polytechnic diploma GPA for NUS (at which point, CS actually has a more stringent requirement than even Business).

It is true - we simply do not get the best and the brightest in Computer Science. And while I imagine it would be very difficult for an entrepreneur with solely non-technical background to create the next big thing in software and Internet technology. The faculty in NUS routinely relies on foreign students to prop up the quality of the student base - an illustrative example is a fellow Singaporean in Google who had my PhD supervisor as his supervisor for his project. In the first meeting between the professor and the student, the professor simply assumed the student was not Singapore and asked, "so, which part of China are you from?".

Geeks make money - No?

Do not fill young people's heads with too much nonsense like how they have to look cool. Sell the cool ideas they work with. Teach them to see that you can make money and be rich only if you have something worth selling, and that is where engineers come in.

Years ago, engineering was the top school to go to.

Today, everyone wants to be in business and make money and that is why our young flock to anything and everything to do with business, finance and economics.

-- Straits Times Forum Comment - Focus on engineers' 'cool' ideas, not their image [straitstimes.com]

As my colleague (in Google mind you) likes to quip: "If you are in software engineering for money, you are in the wrong business."

If you are the gahmen, hear my plea

Singapore might want smart and hardworking generalists to be to civil servants by enticing them with extraordinary salaries. But if you want a striving science and technology sector, specialists have to be nurtured. And my last rant: uhm, propping up A*Star scholars like trophy dogs is not the way to go, simply due to the overemphasis of look-at-my-scholars-with-their-high-grades, aren't they adorable sense of it all.

Rejected by Harvard? Not a problem. You're in good company.

The list is, well, impressive. Investor Warren Buffet, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass,
Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, NBC "Today" show host Meredith
Vieira, former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw, New Yorker magazine
editor David Remnick, CNN founder Ted Turner, folk rock legend Art Garfunkel,
Matt Groening, creator of the animated television series "The Simpsons," Sun
Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
president Harold Varmus, and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger
round out the list.

-- Non Ivy League Graduates

moving pains

The school of computing, NUS, is relocating - and today was the first day for me at my new office ("ooooooo..."), except that it did not go down too well for me.

Let me see,

(1) supposed to pick up keys in the morning, but the lady in charge was in another part of NUS. Waited from 8-10:30am.

(2) made to move from one office to the adjacent one for admin reasons - had to go back to lady in charge to get new keys.

(3) had to set up computer, no internet connections!! even wifi was not working.

somewhat ironically, instead of doing all these internetz stuff at the "state-of-the-art" school, I am writing this in United Square, a shopping mall. Free Singapore-wide Wifi FTW.