[hinkley]

I worked at NCSA while I was in college, and in theory I understood how special that was but in practice I'm still absorbing what that meant. Having a place on campus doing software R&D is better in some ways than an internship, because it can be titrated over a longer period of time. Most colleges don't seem to have something like that. I know I've heard of such things at MIT, Berkeley, University of Illinois, Stanford, maybe RPI and Johns Hopkins, but not a peep from most others. I don't know if that's a PR failure or an educational one.

I had a couple coworkers who were in the same classes as me and as part of trying to improve my time management I'd ask them how long the homework took and would get ridiculous answers like 'an hour' (2+ week assignments usually take tens of hours). I couldn't tell if they were smarter than I thought, braggarts, or liars, but after I switched from a support role to a coding role, in the space of a semester I was doing my homework in 2-3 hours. Often those homework problems are just a bit harder than an interview question, but without practice you're improvising the whole thing and that's a lot of effort.

Before we started talking about 10,000 hours, I already had a rule of thumb that your competency as a developer tends to ratchet up at 100 hours, and rather substantially around 1000 hours. An internship will definitely hit 100 hours, but 1000 is still easily achievable in a year. 10k hours might as well be an imaginary number. That's longer than they've been in school and so feels like an unreachable finish line. Demotivating for sure. 1k just means "work hard for a bit".