Today Dawn will be grading a seemingly endless succession of veterinary students on how well they wash their hands. (It’s part of the vet school’s Objective Structured Clinical Examination on clinical skills. Pre-surgery hand-washing is pretty elaborate. I remember something about ten strokes on each of four sides of each finger. Also, you fail if you let your washed hands fall below your waist.)
The glamorous life of a college professor in the medical sciences.
A gazillion years ago, Alistair Cockburn reported on observational research he’d done at IBM. He’d concluded that the best programmers were characterized by high skill at a large number of what he called “microtechniques” – the equivalent of medicine’s handwashing, suturing, and so on.
This is well known in medicine, and their training takes it into account.
@marick I’ve long said that there should be a freshman-level CS class that covers basic IDE usage, bash, git, and unit testing.
I dropped out of school senior year, got a job which taught me these things, and then went back a year later. It was like I had developed superpowers compared to all of my classmates and I was able to get my assignments done at more than twice the speed. I taught some of them to a friend and he also sped up considerably.
I’m not a person who thinks that CS degrees should be job prep, but IMO learning basic practical skills early on could make the rest of the degree more effective. I spent so much of my first three years wasting time on repeatedly breaking and debugging fragile code which could have instead be spent focusing on more course material.
Brian Marick
jnkrtech
fanf42