College Students

Why are they all so bad at programming?
This is my second semester at Uni and I am seriously helping seniors complete their idiotic Java programming assignments. It took me three fucking hours to explain one guy the difference between a compiler and an interpreter.

I thought Universities would be filled with programming geniuses, what the hell?

The problem with college CS kiddies is that they all want to go into the video game industry. They want to be game programmers, and think that all that that entails is beta testing. They don't know the kind of challenge that programming can be, and probably don't know that there is real science in computer science: it ain't all about the programming. There is collection, interpretation, and reporting on data. I just let my computer run for 15 hours generating data on the time variation of an algorithm as its data set size grows, which I am going to compare with the predicted asymptotic complexity of the algorithm (for an assignment in AI: the teacher is totally anal about writing up results of assignments, but he brings in grant money like a beast and makes his "employees" do the same). That's science in computer science.