Computer Science Students: a foolish, incompetent, & embarrassing mess

By Osama Alhour

Note: normally, I make extensive checks on my posts before publishing them, however, this one is to be entirely unfiltered, just my 1,300 word frustration piece written at 11pm

Introduction

For basically the entirety of my time as a programmer (~2020-present), I’ve spent most of my time in online communities with incredibly smart people that I can’t describe as anything less than highly skilled and talented, communities such as Hack Different. These communities meant a lot to me: they were, in essence, where others taught me how to program, how to debug, where I was taught a good amount (70%?) of all the incredible knowledge I know now about computers, from basic topics like, “what’s the difference between a local and global variable?” to more complex, niche topics like the core security systems around iOS & macOS, some of this stuff isn’t documented on papers or writeups or videos: I went out of my way to ask people who’ve been in these fields for so long (some for longer than I’ve been alive) questions about a countless number of topics that I’ve learned now.

However, the single disadvantage I can point out from these communities is that since they were made up of predominantly experienced people, they disillusioned me from the actual state of CS: The topic of this post

What’re you even talking about?

On June 5th, 2024, I finally graduated from High School and was finally excited to enter University, I’d been excited for this ever since middle school, and especially after I picked up programming as a hobby, I loved programming & learning about the internals of how my everyday devices worked, I spent countless hours in the communities I mentioned above, but also reading papers, blog posts, and watching conference videos about these topics.

When I graduated, I finally thought, I’ll enter University and find others like me who have dedicated nearly a third of their lives to it, I mean, if they’re also majoring in Computer Science, a substantial amount of them must also be interested in it, right? Sure, not as much as I was, I knew I was a bit of an outlier beforehand, but I thought there must at least be a significant amount of people majoring in Computer Science who… like Computer Science? It just seemed like common sense to me, and oh how foolishly excited I was to enter University and think I’ll find these people…

I entered my university (the German Jordanian University) in September of 2024 (I am writing this as of January 14th, 2025), at first, I didn’t just struggle to find people who liked Computer Science as much as I did, I struggled to find people who liked CS in the first place!! Just imagine my everyday shock, in the beginning of university, I’d talk to around ~10-15 new people per day (as is standard, no one really knows each other at the start), I’d meet a couple who are majoring in CS, but when asked if they had prior experience beforehand, all but 2 said no! After a couple of no answers I, frankly, got a bit blunt and started asking the question that was on my mind (though in bit of a comedic tone, my intention wasn’t to judge people): “Do you like Computer Science, or did you enter it for the money?” I would like you, dear reader, to guess what an overwhelming majority of the answers were. Horrifying, isn’t it?!

Incompetency is the Golden Standard

Do not get the wrong idea: I don’t expect everyone to have been a professional or even a programmer beforehand before entering CS in uni, perhaps they majored in CS to learn from scratch, and I am sure there are tons of great programmers who started out from zero in university, so I quickly disregarded those thoughts about how it was a bit eerie that these people are all entering CS just as a get-rich-quick scheme, so I looked on to 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th year students (5th years being Computer Engineering, as many people go into CE solely for the Engineer title due to it somewhat of a prestigious thing, a somewhat related problem for CS), among those later year students, I was even more horrified by what I’d seen: a 2nd year student not knowing how to for loop over an array, and a 3rd year CS student who forgot what a variable was!! I was left speechless as though I’d seen a corpse… you pay thousands to study at this university, how are you, as the student, okay with this?

If you are shocked, dear reader, let me clear one thing up: At universities now, incompetency is the Golden Standard for students, it is encouraged, loved, and rewarded, most of these students have LinkedIn accounts, go on them and what will you find? An array of posts along the lines of “today, I’m proud to announce that I got a certificate by some organization for some technical topic, say, AI or Web Development”, with a good amount of people (say, 20-40, people), most of whom are people they know in real life such as friends, reacting to their posts with heart or clapping emojis, and some leaving replies such as “amazing” & “wonderful”… It’s like a cartel, but instead of drugs, it’s incompetency and downright abysmal students who shouldn’t even be able to pass the exams they’re given

They don’t want help

After the introduction to CS midterm, the grades were less than great, some professors had an average of 12/30 for their sections, wow! My foolish self thought, why don’t I help the students by making slides and doing a revision session for them? I then devoted 2 weeks to making 84 (later reduced to around 67) slides from the ground up to summarize the course, and 30 slides of practice questions I made to help, the response after making these slides? Despite over 35 students using these slides, 1 said thank you.

I put this behind me and worked on preparing for the review session in the university, which was a lot of bureaucratic work to get approval & book an auditorium for, as well as designing my own poster to hang on several floors of 5 separate buildings, as well as the aforementioned slides and questions I made before… the time for the presentation comes around: at first, ~40 people came! I was happy and excited… then, people started leaving one by one, I’d ask if anyone had any questions, and no one would answer… I’d ask questions to check if the audience understood, and no one would answer either… well with a 12/30 average I think there’s questions to be asked? Instead, the audience just left, one by one, and by the end, 7 people remained, when I finished the session, not a single thank you or display of appreciation was shown. I’m a very honest person so I’ll be upfront: I 100% regret doing the review session, it feels nothing short of stomach turning to put in so much effort to people who wouldn’t care if you were to disappear tomorrow.

Never Again.

Professors are the exception

I would like to take a short break from the negativity to note that the professors who teach these courses are an entirely different thing from the students, these professors are passionate people who care about the topic and put all their soul into making the material for the course and teaching it, none of the professors I met for CS at my university were bad, in fact they were all experienced people with good intentions, and I would like to thank each and every one of them for their efforts into teaching a demographic I’d have given up on many moons ago.