3 things I learned about software in and out of school

Following the lead of Carnage4Life and Scott Hanselman, here are my own items:

Three things I learned while in school

1. Some people can program, others can't. Those who can't will never be good at programming, even if they work really, really hard. I learned this when I saw somebody stare at a compiler error message for 30 minutes (until I helped them with it) for a simple missing parenthesis! Staring at the error message for more than a minute is not going to help you figure it out when all it says is "Parse error..."
2. It's hard to know when to stop generalizing. I learned that in Software Engineering when we had heated discussions about whether we should bring generalizations to the next level, something I was very much against.
3. Working in a group is more fun, but can be disturbing to by-standers.

Three things I learned while not in school

1. Business people tend to ignore technology under the pretense that business concerns are more important, but it's not a good idea. Technology problems don't really go away by themselves, even if CPUs become vastly faster every year.
2. Software is a highly volatile industry. When I left school, it was the .com boom, 99.99% employment, etc. etc. Since then, I've seen ups and downs, but always in a very protracted time period.
3. As you grow older, your experience will tend to grow stale. The reason for this is that as you gain experience, you are more and more likely to become the team lead or senior programmer of your team. As such, you won't have anybody to "pull" you forward as you did when you team lead or senior guy was there and you tried to show off that you were a better coder/designer. The only fix is to always remain open to ideas, regardless of how junior the person who expresses the idea may be most of the time.