Not at all.

I’m a dropout. 🤷‍♂️

My dropping out was due to mental health from a bad relationship and also the realisation that I was failing the math-based portions of the course.

I’ve no doubt had I been better with maths and finished, the course would have been useful, but not the degree itself.

Not having it has never been a real barrier to my finding work, though it did raise eyebrows and require explanation to begin with... now my CV kinda speaks for itself in a way a degree simply doesn’t.

Throw in the fact that most grads can’t code (https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-c...) and employers are starting to wake up to the pointlessness of the degrees.

Real world learning, experience and intuition are *far* more valuable.

I will counterbalance this with the caveat that, if you’re doing things on the very bleeding edge, then a compsci degree beyond undergrad is likely the course you want to forge, I assume there’s no decent substitute for access to the knowledge of experts and the tech / equipment they bring to bear.... just avoid becoming an ivory tower type and you’ll be fine.

A follow-up to a previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2296700/...

... and how the senior dev recently took it up a notch.

To recap: Back then the senior dev in our two-man project prepared tasks for me so thoroughly they became typing monkey jobs. He described what to do and how to do it in minute detail in the JIRA tasks.

I talked to him back then how this is too detailed. I also talked to our boss, who agreed to nudge mr. senior in the right direction and to make it clear he expects teamwork.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. An existing feature will get extended greatly, needing some rework in our backend project. Senior and me had a phone call about what to do and some unclear details in the feature spec. I was already frustrated with the call because he kept saying "No, don't ask that! That actually makes sense, let's just do it as the spec says" and "Don't refactor! We didn't request a budget for that from our customer". Like wtf, really? You don't consider refactoring part of our job? You don't think actually understanding the task improves the implementation? Dude...

We agreed this is a task for one person and I'd do it. It took me the rest of the day to wrap my head around the task and the corresponding existing code. It had some warts, like weird inheritance hierarchies and control flow jumping up and down said hierarchy, but nothing too bad. I made a mental note to still refactor this, just as much as necessary to make my task easier. However... the following day, I got an email from mr. senior. "I refactored the code after all, in preparation for your task". My eyebrows raised.

Firstly, he had made the inheritance hierarchy *worse*. Classic mistake: Misusing inheritance for code reuse. More control flow jumping up and down like rabid bunnies. Pressed on that matter, he replied "it's actually not that bad". Yeah, good work! Your refactoring didn't make things worse! That's an achievement worthy of being engraved on your tombstone. And didn't he say "no refactoring"? Apparently rules are unfortunate things that happen to other people.

But secondly, he prepared classes and methods for me to implement. No kidding. Half-implemented methods with "// TODO: Feature x code goes here" and shit. Like, am I a toddler to you? Do you really think "if you don't let me do things myself I feel terribly frustrated and undervalued" is best answered with giving me LESS things to do myself? And what happened to our boss' instruction to split the task so each of us can work on his parts?

So, this was a couple of days ago. Since then, I've been sitting in my chair doing next to nothing. My brain has just... shut down. I'm reading the spec, thinking "that would require a new REST endpoint", and then nothing happens. I'm looking at the integration test stubs ("// TODO: REST call goes here") and my mind just stays blank, like a fresh unpainted canvas. I've lost all my drive.

I don't even know what to do. Should I assign the task back to him and tell him to go fuck himself? Should I write my boss I'm suddenly retarded? Could I call in sick for a year or so? I dunno... I can barely think straight. What should I do and how?