Figure out ways to do the tedious busywork as quickly as possible while still getting an acceptable result (and acceptable might still mean straight As).
I’m suspicious of the direction of causality in what you described:
Within the useful classes, doing more than the bare minimum on projects made a very big difference, and the people who obsessively improved their trivial programming projects became the same people who found it easy to get an internship, and then eventually the people who skipped the “Junior Engineer” job title and jumped directly into “real programmer jobs”.
Some people enjoy programming independent of schooling. It’s meme-level widespread (i.e. common) knowledge among programmers; so much so that the resentment by (professional) programmers that don’t enjoy hobby programming is also meme-level widespread.
I don’t think advice to ‘do more than the bare minimum on projects’ or ‘obsessively improve your trivial projects’ is any good really. The people that seem to benefit from the advised behavior don’t need any additional motivation to do it and everyone else isn’t going to benefit from doing what is, to them, just more “tedious busywork” (and without any short-term payoff).
From the post:
I’m suspicious of the direction of causality in what you described:
Some people enjoy programming independent of schooling. It’s meme-level widespread (i.e. common) knowledge among programmers; so much so that the resentment by (professional) programmers that don’t enjoy hobby programming is also meme-level widespread.
I don’t think advice to ‘do more than the bare minimum on projects’ or ‘obsessively improve your trivial projects’ is any good really. The people that seem to benefit from the advised behavior don’t need any additional motivation to do it and everyone else isn’t going to benefit from doing what is, to them, just more “tedious busywork” (and without any short-term payoff).