Software Engineering – Week the Fourteenth
When classes come to an end professors and students alike become tired and in need of vacations. We’re all people after all. While it is usually good for teachers to be empathetic to students wanting to leave as soon as possible after classes end, a terrible situation often arises, as it did this semester for me.
I have 4 tests and two projects due this week. Then during _actual_ finals week I have two exams. One would think I’m taking 20 hours of classes or something to that tune, but really, I am only taking 5 classes. It seems the agitation to get away from school has in fact made the situation not better, but worse.
Questions start to emerge: how am I expected to study and work on the projects? What split between these topics would the professors recommend. What is the dominant strategy to this game? Right now, cruelty is all I can see. However, as Napoleon (and a lot of other people were attributed to say) “Attribute not to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” My theory is that these profs simply have not planned things appropriately.
Gladly, this is not the case with all professors. Some are responsible–if they get behind they will cut curriculum in the interest of providing a safe and learning-friendly environment for their students (after all, it’s about learning, not suffering). But the professors who do not value this end up tangling the legitimate coursework in their web of hasty and ill-conceived series of last-minute deadlines. I’m happy to say Software Engineering is not one of these classes. The project was done well before the test to provide time to study for the upcoming exam.
As I start to consider life as a software developer, I start to worry about management like this: deadlines which higher-ups did not realize until the last minute and just now are forking onto your already full plate. Planning, something that can be so easily done can cause so much grief if it’s neglected. The only solution I can see to such a problem is to have transparency and make deadlines known to all levels of engineers at a company. The effect will be two-fold: first, the managers do not have to do as much managing, rather they can focus on general direction. Second, coders will never be in a situation with too little to do–they can see the road ahead and have the ability to get ahead. But for now I must deal with school: a very heirarchical and somewhat arbitrary construction.
4/28/2014