I thought the major argument ... for using vi/m over emacs was startup time.

Maybe 20 years ago, but I just opened a file in Emacs and it loaded in about a half a second.

I guess all of these students were planning on going into politics.

I you used that word in an interview, I would think you had sneezed.

managed some large business application development projects

There are business applications, and what I would call technical applications such as image processing, geographic information systems, numerical analysis, etc. I work for a large company that does the latter, and every project that I am aware of uses C++.

Microsoft has an internal policy of deliberately making bad versions of Windows to increase sales

You make it sound like Windows 8 is a stroke of marketing genius instead of a case of user interface design stupidity. I’ll put my money on stupidity.

I live in the U.S where most software development related degrees are called "Computer Science". My current title is "Software Developer". I have seen companies where people doing the same thing I am have the title "Software Engineer". I don't think the title has any correlation with what you do at work.

You don't define the difference

Right. How are the lawyers going to make any money if everything is well defined?

Perhaps you'll be good enough to propose several alternative hypotheses

• 1. The good test scores were primariy made by the math and science majors.
• 2. The good test scores were primariy made by the psyc majors.
• 3. The good test scores were evenly distributed among the various majors.
• 4.I'm delusional and I just imagined this whole thing.

I'm putting all my money on hypothesis one.

I don’t mean for this to sound arrogant, but it probably will. I was a physics major who took a statistics course that was taught in the Psychology Department and meant for psychology students. A lot of science and math majors took the course as a way to pad their GPA’s. I could see from the books the other students brought to class that about one forth of the students were science or math majors. I think I made about a 96 on the first test and was embarrassed at the thing I missed. The class average was 48 or something. The grad student teaching the course said that maybe the test was too hard, but “there were a lot of very good grades”. I have a feeling that not many of the good grades were made by the psych majors.

If I were teaching the course, I would probably emphasize the purpose of the various statistical techniques for behavioral evaluation, and not make the math portion too detailed or rigorous.

Did that reduce complexity or increase complexity?

It helped manage complexity, but it increased the skill level needed to program effectively.

We have a fair number of women where I work. The interesting thing is that they are all Asian. Whatever we stupid males are doing to drive away women apparently doesn't work on Asian women. Or it could be that there is something in Western Culture that discourages women from pursuing careers in programming.

I’m afraid I didn’t do a decent job of explaining myself. I didn’t mean to say that the tester did a poor job. She did a very professional job. It’s just that users will use the system in ways that can’t be predicted. This was a complex system with a flexible user interface. The kids (two of them, not a big group) used the system in unexpected ways, just as users sometime do.

Developers often make poor testers

Sometimes professional testers make poor testers. I worked on a project with a professional tester who did her job conscientiously, wrote test procedures and methodically exercised the software. We also hired some college kids during the summer and assigned them to test the software. They just tried things. The kids found a lot more bugs than the tester.

I hate marketing stuff, I hate business stuff, and I really hate "networking" .. what I love is building software.

Me too. And that’s exactly what I do. Where I work, management handles the business stuff. You just have to keep looking for the right company where they realize that a first rate programmer is a valuable resource even if they aren’t into the business stuff.

The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people.

When I started college I majored in Physics. It was hard. I switched to the much easier (but still hard for some people) Computer Science major. After I graduated I got a job in software development. It was hard. These disciplines are inherently hard. Making the curricula easier may help graduation rates but it is not going to prepare students for careers in STEM. Most of the people who drop out of STEM and major in something else are going to lead happier and more productive lives than if we somehow kept them in a discipline that they are not suited for.