[bobbyz]

In my experience, the biggest reason doing a bachelors in CS sucks is because it's a massive waste of time, leaving little to no time for side projects. Programming assignment questions tend to be vague and come with poorly scoped requirements. Usually the professor also forgets to tell you several essential details or has made several errors in the code. An average assignment can take upwards of 40 hours, with 10 or more of those hours spent because the professor was too lazy to check over their assignment for 30 minutes before handing it out. The saying that A students work for C students really makes sense in this context. A students never got the chance to work on what they wanted!

[bdcravens]

I'm only being partially snarky when I say that sounds like a great preparation for working in a production environment.

[bobbyz]

Every time I make this point someone says something to this effect. If you spend your career writing garbage for a ransomware gang or an outsourced app development agency you probably won't have too high an opinion about software development. It's just a difficult thing for me to believe that this happens in large amounts at the best companies.

[bdcravens]

Most jobs aren't at either of those two extremes (garbage vs best companies). There's a lot of work in the middle, where your job is to use your tools to facilitate a business outcome; if your boss has to tell you how to do it, the company probably hired the wrong person.

[bobbyz]

I suppose thats true. Its not very interesting to think about the in-between.

[adamredwoods]

At U of Washington you get to choose your own senior project (so I've heard firsthand).

[bobbyz]

Thats actually pretty cool. I actually go to the other UW and watch jealously as startups are regularly birthed from capstone engineering projects.

[OkayPhysicist]

Wait, that's not the norm? What's the alternative, do they just let a professor invent a couple dozen projects?

[detaro]

Luckily, not all universities are that crap.