Good questions from students

I love visiting high school and college classes to help students learn what it’s like to do software engineering professionally.

Recently I was a guest speaker in a local high school computer science class, and afterward got a great bunch of emails from the students.

Each one thanked me, named something specific of interest from my talk, and asked me a question. Clearly there’s a rubric there, but the messages did not feel forced or formulaic at all. On the contrary, I got some nice appreciations and some good questions.

I responded to all of them (cc’ing the teacher, as the students had done).

Here are some of the questions. Great to see 10th-graders thinking about this stuff, and I enjoyed responding. How would you answer these?

• “What would someone look for in my resume if I was applying for a position as a software engineer?”
• “What do you do when your websites start crashing when too many people start using the site?”
• “What makes a great start-up?”
• “I was wondering how beneficial it is to learn C# and if it would help me land a good future.”
• “You said that you rent out an office instead of working at home. Is remote work not all what it’s cracked up to be?”
• “I was wondering what year you created dpaste, and what led you to create it? Also, do you have plans for any other side projects?”

One comment multiple students made was that it was nice to have me there in person instead of over Zoom. That feeling was mutual!