You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)
Between Ada, Scheme, C, and C++, class sizes shrunk fast.
IMHO this is more fair than making the department hard to get into. Let everyone have a go at it.
Sounds legitimately fun. I wish more CS depts kept a tasteful blend of Haskell/C/Lisp instead of forcefeeding you a vile mix of "using std; C++03" and overly-OOP Java.
Related: Implementing networking stuff using raw sockets is fun!
I ended up with C, Ada, C++, Scheme, Java, C#, and PHP on my resume by the time I graduated.
Started my career on a compiler team! (see https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested... for more info on my first job out of college!)
He honestly did a disservice to my learning of FP and probably set me back a good 4 or 5 years. He did a great job of filtering out students from the department though!
So after I got a horrible grade in his class I retook with the other professor, who taught the class (which was labeled as discrete math / logic class) as an extension of the textbook, and accordingly I did pretty good, but I didn't really learn anything about functional programming!
As an aside, that series of 2 classes had some amazing proofs. Proving addition on integers was an absolutely wonderful experience.
The data structures class was hard, we had a ton of material thrown at us really rapidly. I was taking the other fail out class mentioned above at the same time. When the quarter ended the department advisor asked me why I did that (because no one advised me not to...)
The C programming course, I think that hurt a lot of students. I had a good time with it, but we had to implement a shell and for many students, I think that would've been their 5th programming class ever.
Oh also that is when we had to start using source control.
One cool thing about Western is that quite a few of the professors came in from industry, so practices like "source control is part of your grade" were around really early on (again, this was 2004 or so I think).
Also tiny class sizes, and regular office hours. Professors would regularly be online chatting with students late at night the day before assignments were due. When I was at Western, only the first 2 intro courses had TAs doing any teaching, everything after that was a class of 20-30 and a professor up front.
2. College admission and graduation rates are important and watched.
Getting into a highly selective school mostly just means the student fit one of a handful of profiles at age 18 which the admissions process looked for, most of which have little to do with the students actual abilities or aptitudes. But thanks to nepotism, network effects and the cultural belief in those schools representing "the elite", there is a significant self-fulfilling prophecy.
Overall, society would probably be better if we all admitted it's a farce, and focused more on what people accomplish in college and after, rather than giving such power to the admissions staff at a handful of universities.
Plenty of students who failed out of CS moved over to Management Information Science, the building was right next door so it was a short walk.
But seriously, everyone should be allowed to try. Western giving me a chance dramatically changed my life for the better, and based on emails I've gotten from customers for products I've worked on, its helped me change other people's lives for the better as well.
That’s quite typical in other places of the world as well. In Italy is just like that for most stem programs; admission is granted to everybody, but the 1st year is just brutal and boring. A lot of people drop.
The upside is that you don’t have that stress on admission. The downside is that some good people lacking grit just drop after 1-2 years (or just take ages to get their degrees) because such classes look pointless but very hard to them - and they’re mostly right.
Note: we don’t usually grade on a curve in Italy. But 80% of the class failing the first time is not unheard of (you don’t get your failing grades recorded or re-pay for retaking a class, either).
yeah, but you'd expect STEM types to know how to analyze data and realize they aren't the majority and that these studies are not representative of them. I am disappoint.
yes, I agree, that's what I was advocating: HNers with a personal anecdotal axe to grind frequently throw away the value of good posts because they have just have to grind their axe axe again.
Whether social media is harming children's development is an interesting and important question and of a scientific nature, so
people here should cut the researchers some slack and at least read the evidence at face value
Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How many people create side projects to land employment at a coffee shop?
To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an employee can make a cup during the interview? How many people are excluded from an interview because they only made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many are asked to go through a take home coffee making task? None..
I made minimum wage at my first job. Didn't cross the poverty line until my 3rd or 4th job years later. Things might be different now, I started after the .com crash.
The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse.
If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved.
The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street.
Learning to overcome high stress experiences is a transferrable skill regardless of the context in which it was learned.
This doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent high-stress life. The call center employee has fewer or worse options for dealing with stressors outside their job which they share with the executive.
> I need to eat.
> I need to travel.
> I need somewhere to live.
By and large these things cost money and the person who doesn't have to worry about having enough money for such things is going to have less stress in their life.
Your luxury car repair drama is fleeting. Being wracked with stress about your entire life 24/7 only lets up when your mind finds a way to squirm out of it for a minute by watching a show or powering through a package of cookies on your couch.
Stress is not equivalent across all.
Mr BMW has no idea how much his energy bill was last month, smiles every time he pays his mortgage. Single mom carries a past due balance of $800 and barely makes rent each month. Two different, not equivalent, worlds.
In general, management level decisions can affect entire teams of workers and have downstream impacts on products used by millions of people. That is a form of pressure. So is the way pro athletes can be put on the spot, and it's not like their output has huge "real world" impact.
Yeah, obviously we'd all rather have pro athlete stress than single working mom stress. But there's 0 reason to strawman what that stress is.
How so?
Working people haven't had a raise since 1971.
We spend twice as much on health care as any other nation, but only Peru, Brazil, and several nations in Eastern Europe had worse results from covid. All of Africa cared for covid cases better than we did.
I'm sure you can think of other issues.
What's the worst stress the person you're replying to has ever experienced?
I'm very curious about how you know so much about the parent commenter's life compared to your own.
Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make lemonade when given lemons?
I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.
Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.
You assume that this is simply a matter a making a decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
There are others that will find this difficult-to-impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how else can you change the cycle without telling someone to snap out of it ?
Anxiety is an internal response that can be expected to be different for different individuals under the same circumstances.
Trying to judge whether or not another individual "ought to" experience anxiety in a given situation is a matter of opinion and it has no bearing on what the other person is experiencing.
My life as a radioshack wage slave began and ended when I clocked in and out. If something was fucked when we left the previous night that was tomorrows problem. It's retail, no one is being paid enough to truly care.
Doing contract work for engineers who are willfully ignorant of fire code causes me lasting stress in my soul.
Either way the biggest stress is still financial and I'll stop stressing about that when I'm dead.
Compare/contrast: "living in exurban Detroit is depressing" (= has many environmental depressors) vs "poets are usually depressives" (= depressive disorders being common among people who choose to become poets.)
We use different words (most of the time) for these two things when speaking of depression, but often aren't so careful with anxiety.