‘Tis mid-​​autumn, when a young person’s heart turns to thoughts of… well, midterms and papers and such­like crap, appar­ently. The grad­ing thereof (as many of the peo­ple to whom I link are writ­ing now)… and also the tak­ing thereof.

I recall Alex Mal­let had a hard time a while back with a midterm. Mine yes­ter­day… an utterly dif­fer­ent experience.

[Type type type. Redact redact redact.]

I have never ever been put in a sit­u­a­tion where I want to make an appoint­ment to meet with the instruc­tor, sit down, and start off, “I have to tell you that I’m very con­cerned about your per­for­mance in this class.…”

But I am. Really. This is a pro­vi­sional class, taught by a young tenure-​​track fac­ulty mem­ber. We are so far off the play­ing card here… [well, looks like I’m going to redact that one too].

The worst I can get is a bad grade, some amus­ing anec­dotes, and a half-​​dozen use­ful neg­a­tive exam­ples I can use next time I’m train­ing instructors.

I really, really like this guy. And so, at this eleventh hour, I hereby com­mit to do my best to help. I will be happy to set aside what­ever time it takes to work with him to rewrite the syl­labus so it can get back on topic, intro­duce some kind of the­sis to the mate­r­ial he’s try­ing to present, really bring those ped­a­gogic points home with some killer exam­ples, and gen­er­ally squash and elim­i­nate the reams of obfus­ca­tory chaff that’s crept in.

Cause I sat in that exam think­ing, What in God’s name is this test­ing?! Writ­ing untested, slap­dash, hur­ried code under pres­sure? With no the­ory, no rea­son, no back­ground, no point? Syn­tax and object models?!

There. Now I’m in a state. I will unredact a lit­tle bit:

There is no excus­able sit­u­a­tion in which you should be writ­ing code as if it were writ­ten for an exam. None. I would fire the HR per­son who con­sid­ered using an exam like this, even when try­ing to place some­body for the mean­est lit­tle code mon­key job. The whole point of pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­op­ment is to make it so that set of con­di­tions never, ever arises: As a devel­oper you should be unhur­ried, thought­ful, cun­ning, delighted, engaged, well-​​armed, always writ­ing tests, always col­lab­o­rat­ing, and inces­santly talk­ing with your cus­tomer about their needs.

Every step away from those is a sin, because it takes value away from your cus­tomer. So, in a nut­shell: we were just tested on our abil­ity to sin. Along many axes at once.

Worse, some of my class­mates will end up being man­agers. They will have had one expe­ri­ence writ­ing code, and if this is all they’ve seen I’m wor­ried they’ll come to expect the same per­for­mance and behav­ior from their own devel­op­ment teams. At best they’ll think, “Oh, I already know how to run Excel.”

They are being trained to become the Pointy-​​Haired Bosses of tomorrow.

The going rate at the Com­mu­nity Col­lege for what we’ve going to do—in the whole semester-​​long class as it is play­ing out now—is about $372. Plus gas money.