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Comment by johnzim | Hacker News Reader

This is the perfect opportunity to test some anecdata of mine: I’m hard pressed to think of a more anti-homework audience than programmers.

An absurd percentage of programmers I met hated homework and did their best to do as little of it as possible.

Is my grouping just weird or are most programmers deeply homework averse?

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We're waste-of-intellectual-time averse. Autodidacts like to learn things for the pleasure of learning, and there were very few homework assignments over the years (at least in the public US schools I attended) that were even worth the ditto paper they were printed on.

Can confirm, hated homework. I understood things too quickly so I never had push myself to learn, thus homework felt like a chore or a petty punishment.

This burned me later in life because “remembering what the teacher said yesterday” and “using other test questions to answer the current question” only gets you so far.

I write my tests specifically so previous test questions do not answer future test questions on the same test. It's interesting how many "A students" get B's and C's on the first few tests I give...

I find that those who lie at that critical intersection of high intelligence and extreme laziness tend to get into programming. Perhaps it's the appeal of machines that can do your homework for you.

Anyway, that's why they end up making webshit for Facebook and not building rockets, curing cancer, or solving tricky economic problems for the President. Those jobs go to people with the sitzfleisch to do their homework.

_Everyone_ hates homework. Would a lot of people/children do homework if not coerced into it by teachers, parents and the threat of "losing at life"? No.

It will be hard to find any group of people who enjoyed doing homework.

I certainly hated and skipped as much homework I could while maintaining my grades as a kid. My math homework? Unengaging, rote, and on the face of it pointless busywork. No meaningful reward or payoff.

And this is coming from someone who ate up the concepts. I have early memories of looking up cos/sin in an encyclopedia of my own violition to figure out how to draw circles in QBASIC before I had ready access to the internet. As an adult, I've rebuilt my knowledge of matrix math, and built new mental models enabling me to spot incorrect values and understand where it's gone wrong in 3d rendering for my gamedev carreer. I'll engage with math curios on youtube.

I don't hate homework quite as much as an Adult... then again, I'm not forced to do any ;). Homework is, at least in theory, a means of practicing and solidifying skills you're learning. For some skills, I'd like to motivate myself to do that a lot more! But unlike the satisfying click when a concept falls into place, homework can just grind without payoff other than a slight increase in speed for a skill I don't yet actually use for anything... either because I don't have an immediate use case for the skill, or because I'm completely unsatisfied with the end result at my current skill level.

This can be addressed somewhat with extrinisic rewards, gamification...

I largely hated the teacher's inability to plan it? In theory, my school limited them to assigning us 30 minutes of homework a night (which was still a 3 hour max with 6 classes).

That failed to account for a tendency to all assign things at the same time. Given the normal pacing of things, essays and tests tended to appear at the same time.

If we had been employed, there would have been a panic at the spikes of overtime.

Nobody likes homework. Programmers are not any more anti-homework than anyone else.

Personally, I don' think homework is a bad thing, although students shouldn't be having to spend 2 or 3 hours a night doing it. Repetition is an important part of learning, and having some of it done as homework isn't a bad thing if it means class time can be spent in different modes of learning.

And for a kid growing up, those nights are required for development of the brain by resting. Delaying the night rest with "learning" would be ineffective and might even hurt development.

I instead put my time at midnight programming and such, as most people on the IRC channel were online at that time for me...

I mean everyone hates homework, but I was a straight A student all throughout gradeschool. I did what I was told, but in college I learned that the professors aren't always doing what is in your best interest.

I think it really depends how early children and young adults encounter and take notice of this.

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