Shadow an Engineer day (HELP!!)

[Moskie]

All right, so some high school kids who showed interest in being engineers are coming to my work on wednesday, and of course I'll be the only programmer in the office that day. So I, the snot-nosed junior programmer, am in charge of showing these kids what I do.

I don't program anything exciting at my work. Mainly ASP.Net web apps, either financial/busniess ones or data collection/reporting ones.

So what the hell do I do? I'll get cycled through groups of 3 kids or so, and I got about 15 to 20 minutes to do my thing. They're not gonna be interested in OO design or some stupid (yet very useful! ) crap like that, I don't think they're gonna be wanting to see any of the code, and the applications themselves would bore them to tears. And that leaves me with.... what exactly?

I'm recruiting a guy that does GIS work us to show some pretty pictures. I think they'll like that, at least somewhat. But I'm at a loss as to what I can do. Suggestions very much appreciated!

[Kadath]

Being an engineer, my flippant response would be that it'll be good for the kids to see how boring engineering is on a day to day basis. Why would you lie to the kids about your job experience? Do you want to trick them into suffering like you do out of spite or something? You could discuss how working in teams is pretty much the core concept of engineering and how you as a lone engineer can't do anything by yourself -- not even entertain high school kids.

[FngKestrel]

I agree with Kadath. I got out of programming after the tedium of staring at code got to me. Unless you've got a sorting demo (http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~ok...sort/sort.html) or something visual to show them, it'll be pretty dry.

But you may be surprised. I knew high school kids who were really into OOP and saw the value of that and how it related to something they cared about (games).

A generalised talk about OOP would have been really interesting for me at that sort of age - especially relating it to a real-world situation. That's what I'd go for anyway - talking about creating abstract models of real-world situations inside the computer.

[FloydianOne]

Tell them you can hack into the pentagon, that should start some lively discussions.

But to be serious, show them some programming environments, maybe compile some simple programs. First I would ask them what their experience is, if they are all l33t programers then Id just ask them what they want to know. Otherwise show them how fast you can program hello world . If all else fails show them how fast your internet connection is at work, that should impress them.

[mojodragon]

Do you have any diagramming programs? You could show them something in Rational Rose, and possibly show them some of the actual code, but I wouldn't get too involved with that (unless they ask). Remember, these kids have already shown an interest in programming. It's now up to you to weed out the ones that are only in it for the glamour, hehe.

[AngelicVampire]

Build a sorting program, add cool display... amuse kids with pretty colours... ?

Show them what coding is all about, the highs the lows and the masses of caffine (so right now kids I normally drink 10 Gallons of Coffee... wanna help?)

[Moskie]

My direct superior actually suggested Kadath's idea: show them how boring it is. I don't think I'd enjoy explaining that too much...

There's some good ideas here, and I think I'll play it by ear with each set of kids. If they have no programming experience, and don't really want to hear about the coding side of things, then I'll just demo a site or two, tell them what it does and how it's helpful. And if they are interested in the technical side, I'll start talking about what's going on behind the scenes, about programming and OOP concepts.

Thanks for the help, and wish me luck.

[FloydianOne]

Tell us how it went when you are done....

[BAMF]

I wouldnt exactly consider software engineering an engineering job. I was a computer engineer, then moved into geotechnical engineering for my post-grad studies. You are a computer programmer...someone who comes up with algorithms would be a computer scientist. An assembly programer would be the closest thing to an engineer that write programs.

[Moskie]

That's a different discussion altogether there Bamf... I could argue both sides of it.

Anyway, the purpose of this day was to see the different kinds of things that's needed at an engineering company, and programming software is one of those things. So that's where I came in.

All around, it went well. Most of the kids at least feigned interest, some more than others. I showed them examples of what I did, explaining that it really isn't the most complex software in the world, but still software that was necessary and useful. I talked to them about the programming classes offered at their high schools, and how they were like when I took them. Things were a bit rushed, since we were running behind schedule, but I think I gave a good explanation of what my work entails to the people who cared.

Thanks for all your help guys.

[irseg]

I would do a great job of scaring kids away from engineering. Let's see, here's a typical day...

-Get coffee.

-Check e-mail, see if anything broke.

-Get coffee.

-Join my coworkers in cursing the marketing department for bothering us with requests to change the font color or add a graphic to a website because they don't think we have anything else to do.

-Call software company to see if they ever fixed the glaring bug in their product that's holding up something on our end. Whoops, they're in California and won't be open for another 2 hours.

-Get coffee.

-Troubleshoot one of my programs that broke, realize it was because someone else nuked a database table that it depends on.

-Fire up Visual Studio, get back to work on whatever project I have at hand.

-15 minutes later, be interrupted by marketing person acting like the future of the company is at stake because nobody has yet changed the font on some website to the correct shade of orange.

-Get rid of them, then 5 minutes later be interrupted by someone saying the server's down. Test it, works fine, say "works fine for me", watch them walk off in a huff (that response always pisses people off).

-Get coffee.

-Get back to project at hand, curse IIS for crashing with some cryptic error and a code. Do a Google search on the code, find a Microsoft website that lists nothing more than the code and the same meaningless message that shows up in the event log.

-Go outside and have a smoke.

-Come back, start tracking down the problem, get a phone call from some jackass who wants to know how my evalutation of something I looked at 3 months ago went.

You get the idea...

[Kadath]

Originally Posted by Moskie

My direct superior actually suggested Kadath's idea: show them how boring it is. I don't think I'd enjoy explaining that too much...

I think I should immediately be given a job on the same level as your superior based on my clever suggestion. Think you could swing that for me?

Glad to hear it went okay.