jriddycuz

I hated college.

I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now.

I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.

I would agree that to be counted among your "thousands of examples" of outliers, one would have to be obsessively dedicated. Not everyone wants to be a Newton or a Da Vinci though. And there is nothing wrong with that. FogCreek and 37signals are certainly nowhere near as publicly visible as many SV startups, but they are successful and they became that way without the extreme levels of energy that SV startups seem to demand.

Now those firms and their ilk may not fit your definition of "startup", but they are still ex nihilo undertakings that have been able to supply some very demanding consumers. They'll never be as sexy as the Valley kids, but their continued existence serves as ample evidence of their validity. And in that sense, it is a myth that startups must be all-consuming.

"Let's face it, regular expressions aren't for everyone."

Wait, since when aren't they? I would have thought basic regex skills were a baseline shibboleth of a programmer. I even know several non-technical people that are proficient.

Yes, you actually can decide that you're not going to pay content distributors. If you regard IP as an illegitimate idea, then you can act on that.

I think the meaning becomes clear because this sense of the word is almost always used as an attributive modifier of a pejorative term: e.g., "entitled pricks", "entitled, combative princess." I agree with you that it has a much more specific meaning as a predicate compliment: "I'm entitled to my own opinion."

Language changes. People sometimes still complain about "hopefully" being used as a sentence modifier, as in, "Hopefully language mavens will see their role in speech communities as custodians and curators of beneficial older conventions, rather than as guardians and protectors of acrolectic law." However, the etymologically literal sense of this word ("in a manner full of hope") has so little use that the non-standard meaning predominates.

I've seen this before, but it never ceases to amaze me how ridiculous this is.

Excellent point.

I am near the start of my career (3 years in or so) as a programmer, and I spent much of the first part of that working remotely. Though I enjoyed not having to get dressed and drive in traffic to be at the office by 8am, this severely stunted the development of my work skills. Now, when I was working for a startup, I would spend hours and hours at home on projects and remained fairly disciplined, but that was due to the passion I felt for my work. When that startup folded I had to enter the regular workforce for financial reasons, and I found it much harder to be motivated about what I was doing. When working remotely, I found myself constantly distracted and unfocused, and even though I felt I had fairly strong communications skills, my ability to communicate with co-workers did not develop.

There are numerous problems with younger employees working remotely, but the way it stunts one's development as a professional is probably the worst. Now that I'm in an office, I am constantly exposed not only to people more knowledgeable than I, but also people who have learned how to be a professional and how to work in a team.

One thing in particular that struck me is that I didn't really know how to behave in an office. True, there are a lot of ways that the modern office is kind of depressing, but developing decent working relationships based on mutual respect with your co-workers does a lot to make a workplace tolerable and even enjoyable. This respect is not developed in most cases unless you actually observe and learn some office behavioral norms.

Working remotely can be awesome, and stodgy companies should learn that flexibility has its advantages. But these advantages are often strongest for experienced employees who know how to organize themselves and motivate themselves to get a job done wherever they are for little reason other than professional pride and a paycheck.

Excellent point. My dad, who was a journalist for 30 years, always complained about this assumption among his colleagues. Journalists are taught to go talk to the people in charge, and the idea that there is some group in charge of an industry is just an unspoken--and often unthought--assumption about how business works. Obviously it's ludicrous, but it's a side effect of being taught to look for the "big picture" to get the big story.

tl;dr:

If survey classes actually connected the dots, it would promote intelligent students without challenging them to persevere, and ultimately favor the development of bright but undisciplined generalists.

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While I relate to some of the cynicism of the essay, I think this is an emergent sociological phenomenon rather than something that the designers of curricula necessarily intend to do. Sure, there's a need to weed out students who can't hack it later due to a lack of intelligence or persistence, but the idea that course designers set out to build people into student-drones who blindly memorize information because "that's what society needs" is hogwash. This is a result of a need to serve a broad range of students with a limited supply of teaching talent.

I'm confident most college departments would love to get highly intelligent students intensely interested in their field of study. Showing them how to connect all the dots could open a window towards a genuine love for the field at hand, turning a jaded generalist into a dedicated scholar. While persistence may still be an issue with some of these students, showing them how amazing and connected a field can be could encourage them to specialize in this fascinating study. Few things inspire as much persistence as deep fascination. The crappy survey classes probably do more harm than good in turning away potentially excellent students from the material.