I remember when I was a fresh grad, just joining Google. I was naive, starry eyed, and somehow scraped through the gauntlet of interviews thrown my way. Then came my first few weeks at work. I was given the task of writing this new testing framework for my product. In Java. Being the slinger that I am, I was in my zone. I worked for about three weeks, and churned out the code in no time. I had a working prototype which performed all that it needed to, and was customizable. I was pumped. And then came the point where I had to check this in. So of course, I sent it to one of the senior developers for review. And the first set of comments came back.

It almost seemed like there was a line of comment for each line of code I had sent. Suddenly, my starter project seemed like an insurmountable task. I ended up pairing with aforementioned developer, and refactoring the code till it was almost unrecognizable. But the end product after all that blood and tears and refactoring was something much more manageable and maintainable. We added unit tests for each component, and separated our concerns properly.

First, I thought maybe it was just me, I hadn’t learnt something in college. It was a humbling experience, and showed that I had much to learn. But then I saw this repeat. An intern I knew spent his entire internship developing a component for a bigger project, but he was unable to check it in till his internship finished. The code was simply horrible to maintain for anyone who had not written it, and there were no unit tests, so no additions could be done with confidence that nothing else was broken. This was code developed by a really smart guy, who was a pretty good programmer. And this was no isolated case, something along these lines happened again and again. So what happened ?

This was when I started questioning if what happened with me and this intern weren’t just isolated cases but part of something bigger? A conspiracy even? Well, I wouldn’t go so far, but simply put, why weren’t we taught in college how to actually develop software? Why doesn’t Software Engineering actually teach how to write maintainable, well tested applications? Why isn’t there a single CS course which taught us how to work with legacy systems?

I mean, the usual Computer Science degree consists of courses in Discrete Mathematics, Automata Theory, Data Structures and Algorithms, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Software Engineering and many more. And sure, I learnt about how to define classes in my OOAD class, and how to write sorting algorithsm and graph algorithms in my Algorithms class, and what the different steps for a Software project are and what approaches are present in my Software Engineering class. But looking back at it, none of them really prepped me for the work I would do in real life.

For instance, the OOAD class had a great project of creating a Chess game with AI. And I am proud to say I did get it working with a pretty solid AI backing it. But it was not code that I am proud of, nor would I ever want to go back and add a feature or fix a bug in it. My Software Engineering class had a project which was mostly talk and design, and really not that much implementation. And Algorithms was mostly write a function or one or two classes to implement an algorithm.

These were some great professors. And I gained a solid theoretical base in Algorithms and OOAD which would have been impossible otherwise. But some of these professors had industry experience. And the assignments they gave and the problems they assigned reflected nothing of that. And that hasn’t been just my experience, restricted to my university. Talking to my colleagues and friends who graduated around the same time, it has been the norm, not the exception. Why is this the case?  Why couldn’t my CS degree have prepared me for what I would have to work with?

I will continue down this line of thought in my next post, where I try to articulate what I would have wanted to be taught in college, knowing what I do know now.