Have you ever met a "dumb" programmer?

Yeah, I have a similar story from uni.

The head of the CS department chose me as his assistant in my final year, so I got to help out students one year below me with projects. So. The students were meant to be working on this simple line reader app for a LeJOS Lego robot. Not that hard in the grand scheme of things. You just have to be proficient enough to read the documentation, know the basics of Java and just try shit out. The students were mostly from over here, but there were like 5-10 transfer students in the mix.

So, after the first few classes (which were basically a crash course in the basics of Java) it became pretty apparent that two transfer students (drop dead gorgeous girls btw) didn't have a single clue of anything related to the subject. So, not a problem, they were in the final year of their studies in their own university so I figured they had to have at least a basic understanding of programming (because they had specialized in programming, hence them being in that class). They couldn't catch the ball on the first few classes, so I was assigned to personally tutor them.

It was an absolute nightmare. They insisted that I come help them at their shared apartment outside of the campus. I checked with the department head, and he was like "yeah, sure, why not". It became pretty apparent really soon that both of their parents had ridiculous amounts of money, as both of them talked about their summerhouses in italy/south of france or something like that. At the start I thought I could just tutor them through it, but oh my fucking god. I gave them all of the possible material in the world and they were more interested in if I was single (I was at the time), "How such a cute guy would study programming?" and other very personal details about me. The course was like a month long and I tutored them two evenings a week. Every time when I left their place I was really fucking annoyed that not a single productive thing was done. I tried not to give them any straight up answers to their coding problems, because I

I definitely didn't want to get mixed up with them "like that", because I considered my tutoring thing as a position of power over them, so I told the department head of their behaviour pretty soon (that was such a fucking good foresight on my part I might add). I was so fed up with them dodging work, that I even gave them my groups full project from the year before as reference (it was with a different robot and a different version of LeJOS, so they couldn't just copypaste it) so they'd be able to actually get it done. So, like a week before the project was meant to be done they finally got some code down. The code worked almost as intended, but it was really fucking weird. Like the type of weird and complex that I've never seen anything like that in Java. I mostly suck at Java though, so I just wrote it off as them finding some code on the internet. So there was still like a week to go, and I was so relieved that they could actually pass the course and I wouldn't look like a total idiot, having tried to teach these fuckers for a month.

So, queue the next time I got to help them, a couple of days before the actual test with the robot. They have done nothing to the code. It is exactly as it was last time I checked on it. They told me that they didn't understand the code and can't modify it to work as intended. I asked them a couple of times to tell me where did they find the code and they broke down and told me that another transfer student (who'd done Java as a living for the last 15y) had wrote it for them, and that they hadn't had any previous coding experience from school or anywhere (I reiterate, they were on their final year, just shy of their thesis and specialized in programming). They had always just got some guy to do their work for them. After that they straight up asked if I'd finish it for them, and heavily hinted that there'd be sexual favors in it for me. I told them that I don't need to do seedy shit like that just so someone would touch me, and told them I'd report their asses to their teacher. I was so fucking mad at them for wasting like 20-30h of my time during that month.

So, next day when I got to school I went straight to the department head and told him everything that I found out last evening. He told me that the girls called him that I've been harassing them, but he straight up told me that with all the things I've been telling him about their behaviour and him having gotten to know me personally, he doesn't believe them one single bit.

So yeah. Fuck those girls in particular. They were meant to finish their final year over here in Finland and write their thesis here, but they got kicked out of our university immediately after this debacle and I will be happy if I never, fucking ever see them again.

/r/learnprogramming Thread Parent