The biggest lie told in computer science university | #Daily 137

In university (of applied sciences) for computer science, and even before that, I asked my teachers this question.

Do software engineers only producing code during professional work?

They all told me the same gist.

No, software engineers do not sit behind the desk and write code the whole day. For example, they have to talk to their customers, managers, set up plans, communicate verbally, and more.

They lied straight to my face indirectly.

The most important output of a software engineer is code (and code documentation). That’s it.

We like to imagine that a software engineer is less nerdy than it needs to be. This is all because of a dumb stereotype that software engineers are introverted and that it’s something negative. (This is also caused by software engineers themselves because software engineers like to think they should be respected more.)

But there is literally nothing wrong with being introverted and only producing valuable code.

Why do need to pretend that 80% of the meetings are productive compared to writing code or even resting? We all know deep down that 80% of those meetings can be written down in proposals and send through a message.

‘BuT tHeN We hAVe A dEEpER CoNVerSationN.'

No, you mean you are incompetent in writing proposals or documentation. Or the engineer is incompetent in reading, in which one or both you need to improve and get fired.

If I hire the best football offensive player in the world in my football team, I’m not going to tell the person to also play defense. That’s dumb and on the contrary, you should make sure the only thing the person does is play his offensive role.

Instead, we tell the software engineer to write code and do X, Y, Z. Then also tell them that X, Y, Z is as valuable to the produced code.

That’s the lie they told me.

They really thought that while I was being educated to mostly write code, that my other skills are on par with the thing I'm being educated to do.

It's hard to do one thing competently. 80%+ of my productive hours should be put into producing code, else I’m doing the incompetent job with whatever X, Y, Z was, cause I wasn’t hired or educated to do it.

Yes, you can be a jack of all trades if you want to be. Sometimes those make the best managers or team leads as well. But as a pure programmer, your sole most valuable job is to produce code. Don’t listen to the bullshit they are spitting in your face that there is anything besides that.