Acquitted myself nobly, or to say it street, nailed it–kilt it hard; thanks for the prayers.
I sincerely doubt that it will make any practical financial difference, and I vaguely doubt that it will do the actual chilluns present any substantial good either, but … I did my job, very well, one more time. The dignity of work! And all that rot.
Basically I told them: you’re going to need to become programmers, or at least to learn to think computationally, if you want a job, much less a good job, in ten or twenty years. Here’s how you do it.
I didn’t say: or you could chuck this school shit and become an airhead billionaire like whichever one of the Jenner things just managed to do that.
I didn’t say: If you had functioning souls, you’d stop worrying about meaningless irrelevancies like jobs, and get out in the streets shoulder to shoulder with Greta Thunberg before the OK Boomers like me and your grandparents cook you alive from the grave.
I might have said those things, and perhaps I will on the way out the door in May, to the next batch.
But I did say: Here’s video. Hour one of class one in Computer Science, freshman year, at MIT. The rich kids in this class are expected to know everything we learned in this class already, and to start their college lives with at least some limited programming experience under their belts. So there’s your competition, and you’re already behind the curve. You’re going to have to work hard just to pull back even, much less compete in the … capitalist nightmare hellscape … okay, I didn’t say that last part.
That’s what spillin’s for.
So I’ll be working pretty hard right up until the holiday starts tomorrow night, and then I’ll run away jack kerouac for a few and be thankful for the respite. Then one more real week, of work that an algorithm can’t quite do yet. But Lord knows they’re working on that too, somewhere in an evil Cengage e-publisher bunker.
After that it’s all coasting, to the extent that solemnly giving finals and reading a few papers and patiently herding the late work with a surly mix of generosity and exasperation is coasting.
The question left unanswered is:
What about this job?
Is this one of those good jobs?