Student walks into tutoring center halfway through the semester for a computer science appointment and their first question is "How do I declare an int?"
Me: 😐

Stuck in the car driving mum today...

She’s concerned about my little brother’s education and asks me “Is it okay to study I.T at University?”

I just turn and look at her like you’ve got to be kidding me. “Mum I’m studying I.T”

The conversation continues with:
What jobs are there in I.T?
What are you going to do with I.T?
You should become a teacher and I’ll open a tutoring centre for you!

*sigh*

I was tutoring a Freshman, its something you must do at my uni and I saw his code. He said he stopped working when he changed text editors...

God damn, its like the aftermath of a tornado

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

I don't want to judge people by their age, and I won't.
But please
If you decided to become web developer at the age of sixty+, stop starting every single conversation with the 3min monologue about how different things were in your days when you were doing everything on paper and how great it was.
I'm here to fucking teach you how to code. Not to invent a time machine and send you back.
And for God's sake, stop touching my laptop.

I'm tutoring multiple courses in my school, including CCNA 1, html, JavaScript, IT essentials which is just an introduction to particles of a computer.
[Student]: So do you know that course about computers?
[Me]: mhm.....they all are kinda...you mean it essentials?
[Student]:Yes! The one where we type code between tags, right?
[Me]:Wait....html?
[Student]:Yes!
[Me]: yes, I am helping with that course.
[Student]: Oh cool...so how do I do thumbnails?
[Me]: /Opens the IDE/ same as a regular image except for it's a link that opens a bigger version of an image /blah blah blah/. You know how to insert the image on the page, right?
[Student]: Don't we just open the Google and search images?
[Me]:...
[Me]:....
[Me]:...omg my shift is over...

I wish I was making it up.

One of the biggest things that grinds me gears is when I'm tutoring CS at my school as a student tutor is that I get those students who obviously aren't studying or even trying, in fact hoping their tutor will tell them exactly what to type to get that A in the class.

Me: "OK so here's the idea of..." *explains the idea on what they need to accomplish in a more simplistic, visual idea*

Student': *blank stares*

Me: *Blank stares back, thinking of how to make it simpler...*

I then explain I in even more layman terms till they get through their head I'm not going to tell them what to do. I'll guide, but I won't tell what to do.

Please don't waste my time, or I'll waste your time explaing the very fundamental basics of how a variable works instead of helping with your homework.

"Instead of adding an extra bit for counting to higher numbers we could just start counting from 0 again and use the additional bit to show that we count for the second time"

My tutoring student just invented counting.

Me: I need more programmers for the project.
Boss: You have 4 people, that's enough.
Me: I have 3 juniors taking 50% of time of a senior (me) contributing less than a medior and rest of my time goes to managing project. I know that in 6 months time invested in them will start paying off, but right now I need more people. Also I don't have me, by that logic, cleaning lady comes to the office every day and we couldn't work witout her, so there's 5 people, at least.
Boss: You'll manage.
Inner me: I would if I was working 8 hours as programmer without tutoring and managing.
Me: Sigh.

Another day on my tutoring job

This guy who's got no idea about what is he doing here (I had a rant before), runs to me while I'm helping another student. He interrupts me, shoves a USB key to my face:
[Student]: can you do something for me? Can you upload something on my ftp coz I gotta go now.

/*Each student in out school got personal ftp and submitting under the right directory is usually a part of an assignment and cost grades*/

[Me]: I can't, it's against the school policy
[Student (annoyed)]: But I have to go!
[Me]: can't help you, sorry
[Student (still annoyed)]: So you're not gonna do it, huh?
[Me]: No, sorry
[Student (passively aggressively)]: So I guess I'll get a zero for this one.
And he says it like it's my fault!

And he walks away. Me and students I'm helping are shocked. The guy is in his at least 50s. And no common sense whatsoever.

I started my part time job as a tutor today. Yesterday (while preparing) I learned how a browser actually renders a page and bunch of other stuff. Don't get me wrong, I kind of knew it. But not in such detail that I could ever explain it... even though I work in web development since 2011

This will be fun, I wonder what I will learn next

I'm a TA myself and just yesterday wanted to defend my fellow TAs and CS/IT teachers from some of the rants here. Of course not all of the rants are but I found a few quite unfair towards us and I can fully understand a TA getting confused and tired after 5-7 hours of helping and wrapping your head around some of the harder problems the students run into.

However, I'm also a student myself and right now I'm fucking fed up with the shit my supervisor gives me regularly .. So let the rant flow!
(disclaimer: the following text uses “you” to address the rant recipient. So, dear reader, don't feel offended)

First of, why do you fucking care when and especially where I'm working on your project when you know I'm only working part time since I'm usually tutoring students by daylight. Having me come in after my TA shift to work on your project instead of letting me go home, get some rest and food, and start working with a fresh head is neither helping you nor very productive. Also, if you want me to be productive and use your fucking tools to get going faster you better not make me fucking debug your fucking tools. For instance, I don't even have the same first name so all your fucking paths are invalid on my fucking machine! Also, I get that your machine is more powerful than mine and I don't really care about it as long as you don't fucking push convoluted messy timing sensitive scripts and make me search for the correct values on my machine. And, if a file your script is trying to delete is not there aborting is not an valid exception handling!

And don't get me started on the scripts that actually do some work besides setting up your fucking toolchain!

A connection was looking for a developer in the city my brother-in-law recently moved to (for my sister's career), so I connected them. They exchanged a couple of emails, and he has an on-site interview tomorrow!

He and I are both .Net developers, and I'm older/more experienced, so I offered to rearrange my schedule to help him with some interview prep tonight.

He said no, that he's pretty confident about things, that he'll do some studying and research on his own.

Good for him and his confidence, but I'm kinda salty that he didn't take me up on my offer. I'm pretty damn clever. How dare someone reject my offer for assistance?? I hope the interview goes well of course but if it doesn't I'm very much going to feel some silent "I told you so!"

Had to retake one basic CS lecture due to timing constraints and I deeply regret it, because there is a voluntary tutoring which doesn't fail to annoy me.
This time I was randomly placed in a group with students 7+ years younger (some of them straight out of school), exclusively guys and some of them have not figured out where to put their huge ego yet - other than rubbing it in other people's faces.

Normally, I wouldn't even bother but 4h work followed by 4h lectures and not having had dinner prior to this tutoring leave me worrying about when I'll brutally slay and devour the still twitching remains of the next dude who tries to tell me that I don't know shit about assembly.

Several years ago, I heard from a friend who was doing assignments for students on the side. Quite a hustle. His story began when he wanted to figure out why can't these students be able to draw their own database tables, relationships, UML, etc. That's what school has to be teaching them and then he was told that they were learning through MS Access. He goes and tell me that even though this is a lame way of teaching database design, its definitely easier to explain through hands-on and less typing mistakes, as according to the lecturer he met. Making the explanation more visually appealing and helpful for understanding.

OK I get it, but somehow that taught them the wrong way of database design from the beginning. I'd prefer getting them to start writing SQL commands from day 1 and play em at some DB VM. Keep em as real as it gets.

Now I have my own students asking for help in their assignment and also asked for tutoring lessons in web development. So I gave them the crash course in HTML, CSS and Javascript. I've asked them if they've used anything of what I taught them in school. They go and tell me that they've been taught web development through Wordpress. Oh WTF!? I havn't talked to their lecturer yet but it better be a really good explanation to teach these youngsters in a flawed and bloated PHP CMS framework for "web development".

Had a call with my line manager today about extending a deadline to the end of the year. Given the work needed it’s a given as I’m having to pretty much refactor an entire app, plus I also suggested that I train the new guy to give him some experience as I have training and tutoring experience.

It’s the first time I’ve gone “Here’s what I want and here’s what I need for this to work” and it went smoothly.

Great day.

Any Java (JavaFX) developers interested in tutoring me, or helping with my open source project?

Preferably over Telegram, but could be over Twitter or Email.

guys I did it

I'm trying to set up a second Fiverr gig for tutoring Node.JS but i needed an estimate of how long it would take so my friend who doesn't like coding very much agreed to help me

and today he said he understood the cirriculum, was not overwhelmed and had fun

yay

Hashtag my_favorite_student.
Same person. No long story today.

–You know it's so frustrating when you can't find an assignment on your usb stick but you know it's there.

I took a look. It's not in any of three empty folders.

–But I know it's there, okay, I guess I'll just ask another tutor to find it tomorrow.

'I'll fork you'

Anyone know of some Git puns?

I'm tutoring a group of students (university) on using Git effectively in a team. Anything to make it more humorous would be awesome :)

I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.

I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.

I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D

Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?

What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)

Amother one:

Seconf CS101 class. We had to write a program that multiplies two parameters in a method.
I asked the tutor for help because it was my forst timr ever writimg code.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? THIS IS BASIC STUFF YOU SHOULD ALREAEDY KNOW IN YOUR SLEEP. ANYMORE QUESTIONS? "

Went to the prpfessor and told him what kind of assholes are working for him. Found out that the tutpr is not tutoring anyone amymore because the found someone who is not an asshole.
College is fun.

Two years ago my company with local university prepared an internship program for a group of students. At the end one student was hired, but since it was government program, he also got government salary (aka the lowest possible). Today he literally BLEW UP when he found out that new recruits he was tutoring for last 3 months will earn twice as him currently.

My dev goal for the new year will be teaching others, and I could use some help!

For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up some kind of community project in my area teaching people who are having a hard time finding a job in their field how to program, specifically web development, in order to advance their job prospects. There is a lot of demand here in Holland and as we all know it doesn't take much more than dedication, disambiguation skills and an almost fanatical fondness for solving puzzles to lead a very happy life as a developer. I'm hoping 2019 will be the year.

What complete courses can you recommend to teach someone how to code, that are fun/inspiring enough to keep someone motivated (and able to go to school and/or make a living in the meantime) until they can use their built up skills and portfolio to get a first job (perhaps 1-2 years)?

I plan on tutoring once or twice a week for a few hours and being available for chat the rest of the week when not working. I have enough experience (and curiosity) to help with any assignment but I do not have that much spare time, which is why I need this resource to be as good as possible, and to need as little extra explanation as possible.

My benchmark is the excellent freecodecamp, but I'm wondering if anything else is available. Bonus points for anything in Dutch, or anything that stands out by explaining things in the clearest way possible, and with great assignments of course.

Also I'd be very interested in any stories about similar (not-for-profit) initiatives, especially from a learner's point of view.

Thanks!

So I am a lead engineer now. Feels great. Love building infrastructure from scratch and tutoring others by making some good home cooked memes at the PR’s.

I'm following a course to become a Fullstack Web Developer. We have class in the morning and in the afternoon we get some "homeworks" to do. In the afternoon we are followed by some tutors that help us understand better what we did in the morning.
I have this one tutor that never answers to my doubts regarding bugs and errors (in my homeworks) and opens new doubts and problems I didn't think I had..

Why do ppl have to do this, like I'm alreay having one trouble that makes me feel unsecure.. Why do you make things bad and never help?