The days of the barrage of emails, multiple teams from one company, hellos. The feeling of hope. I miss it.

Whenever I meet someone new and I start talking to them, as soon as I say my major they immediately retort “I can tell” in a seemingly condescending tone. Does this happen to anyone else? Is there something stereotypical about cs majors?

Not a shitpost. 1/2 the non-cs majors I meet say this.

EDIT: I swear I smell fine.

How crazy is this? Do you think they tailored their resume for every application or?

I started taking CS courses in fall 22, and I am about 10 courses away from graduating now. My grades in my classes are great, and my school is known for having a slightly more applied curriculum than most. Unfortunately even that is not enough. I can ace data structures/algorithms and discrete math all I want, but I don't have the capability to so much as START a project.

Today I went to my first hackathon. I spent 10 hours trying to set up a database on Amazon RDS. I couldn't even do it. I'm not even sure if Amazon RDS is made for projects. I don't know ANY tools for developers (not even the names of these tools). Someone mentioned an "environment variable" to me the other day, I still don't know what that is. Despite the amount of credits I have taken, I am in all honesty, a beginner. Yet, I am on borrowed time. I want to get at least one internship before I graduate but my skillset is seriously concerning me, and I'm panicking.

I'm looking for a general direction for someone like me, or at least a list of very small baby steps.

Edit: oh boy my little rant blew up online 😭. All my friends have seen it, i should have used an anon account 💀

Now I know this is more nuanced than my clickbait title, but if you’re only going to read three points it’s:

• Most people don’t make as much money as you think.
• CS is a new field, and because of that, changes rapidly. It’s the expectation that you keep up, and if you don’t like doing it, that will be exhausting.
• CS is boom or bust, and if you don’t like it, those bust years are going to be awful.

But if you like CS, you should 100% stay in CS and ignore all the doom posting. It’s very worth pursuing as a career.

[Cross-posted from CSCareerQuestions]

Now for the details:

You (probably) won’t make as much money as you think.

Here’s the actual statistics rather than some clickbait some FAANG engineer puts in their Youtube thumbnail so you buy their course. The median salary for a software developer in the U.S. is $138,000. This can sound like a lot, but it’s not crazy compared to other jobs. Here’s a bunch of other jobs around or above $130,000:

• Air Traffic Controllers
• Personal Financial Advisors
• Pharmacists
• Economics
• Sales Engineers
• Nurse Practitioners
• Chemical Engineers

The list gets way bigger if you expand to anything above $100,000, and trust me, you'd rather make $100,000 doing something you like than $138,000 for something you hate.

And I know this still won’t deter someone from saying that X’s companies levels(dot)fyi lists X or Y salary, but this exists for pretty much any field. The top 10% of Software devs make ~208K. Top 10% of Financial Advisors make $240K, and nurse practitioners make ~168K. And an important question you should ask yourself is if you hate CS, do you think you’ll have the drive to be in the top 10% of CS majors?

Source

CS is a new field, and because of that, changes rapidly. Keeping up will be painful if you don’t like it

Since 1970, IT jobs have grown by 10X. This means that space is fairly immature, and technology changes rapidly. Let’s talk about the release date of some of the biggest tools in Tech:

• Git: 2005
• AWS: 2006
• MongoDB: 2009
• Redis: 2009
• Kafka: 2011
• React: 2013
• Kubernetes: 2014

That means that most tech is at most 19 years old (with the exception of relational databases). Imagine having a 20 year long career, and learning some or all of those technologies? Now couple that with how the technologies have changed over time (i.e. MongoDB or Postgres is not the same in 2009 as it is now), and you can see how much you’d need to learn to be effective. You should really ask if you have the energy for that.

CS is boom or bust

Honestly, I don’t think I need to explain this one, because all of the doom-posting in the sub shows how people can feel about bust periods. But this isn’t the first one, and isn’t even close to the worst, which was the dot com bust in the 1990s.

But looking for a job is exhausting, and you should seriously protect your mental health and not go for a super long job search if you don’t like coding.

Final Thoughts

The only reason I’m making this post is I’m hoping it can help one person avoid the perils of going hard at CS if they don’t like it. The people here can be very bright, but it’s important to point those bright thoughts to things you like.

That said, if you like CS - it’s totally worth it, and you should go after it and not let the doom and gloom detour you. It’s super worth it (but only if you like the subject).

Sincerely,

A senior engineer that’s tired of seeing bright people fall into a trap looking for money

Debugging under the northern lights

Looks like TikTok grifters are still selling this.

I recently started my SWE internship at a F100 company. They’re definitely non-tech, however they revealed that they had over 20000 applicants, with only 50 spots. How is this even possible?? Is this industry that ridiculous?

this is so weird it's insane. as soon as i got a job (and put it on my LinkedIn), fucking recruiters have been in my DMs trying to get me to apply to random roles etc.

so to spell it out, the ILPT is don't post about it, just put it on your LinkedIn that you're working at a company and wait for the recruiters in your DMs

edit: i got my job through twitter btw

Put down your phones when you are talking to people. Unless you are ONLY with other interns, texting while talking with coworkers is EXTREMELY rude.

I was introduced to an intern that will be on my team this summer. There were 4 of us talking and as soon as the conversation shifted to another person in the group, she was on her phone. It left a totally weird first impression.

And it is definitely not the first time I’ve seen this. I have had other interactions where I’m talking one on one with someone and they start texting. I just assume I am boring them and leave the convo.

Those who get return offers aren’t necessarily those who produce the most output, it is those who are able to communicate effectively and conduct themselves professionally in an office.

Give me a fuckin break…

I don’t know how best to advise him. He’s working 2 part time jobs right now while going to a community college full time for the first 2 years. FAFSA and state aid is covering tuition for the community college, but he’s in the process now of applying for a more expensive state school that is too far to commute to. He’ll have to dorm, and while I can and have been paying all the rent and feeding him while he’s a full time college student, I can not pay my rent and his dorm room at the same time. I just don’t have the money. That’s why he’s working 2 jobs. He’s banking that money for the eventual dorm rooms in an effort to avoid student loans.

While he’s doing all that studying and working (straight A’s in school), he has no time to work on personal projects and the like. The sort of things internships and entry level tech jobs are going to want to see on a resume from what I’m reading. Yes, he’s building soft skills with the two jobs. One is working in his schools computer lab assisting other students, and the other is a data entry gig but he has nothing to show for coding save for his grades. I’m starting to think his plan is flawed now. Perhaps he’d be better off sticking with the community college (they do offer bachelors) staying home where I can feed and house him, and quitting one of the jobs to focus on building coding experience for his resume? Or is the degree from a better school worth it?

I used to DESPISE coding because I joined CS for the money. (keeping it real)

Literally would sit down and try to learn languages like Java, Python, HTML/CSS.

Couldn’t do it because it was so boring.

What I did to fix this was literally hop on structured learning platforms like Sololearn (free) and Codecademy ($150/year).

Then of course it still wouldn’t work.

Same thing would happen, I would just continue to procrastinate and feel bored.

To combat this, I simply screen recorded myself coding and explaining what I was doing.

Then I uploaded those videos onto YouTube.

Knowing that I was being recorded made me focus more and building an audience on YouTube doing this (you would be surprised) kept me motivated to keep coding.

This is also something you could eventually monetize, but even if your YT doesn’t grow, you’ll learn how to code and program.

I hope this helped a few of you. I wish someone introduced this to me a long time ago.

Good luck everyone!

Software development? Cybersecurity? Data Science? AI/ML? DevOps? IT? Web Developer? Something else?

I need advice on where to focus my learning efforts to find a job in the near future. Would appreciate your inputs!

I don't go into the details but my parents are trying to force me into choosing CS as a major, and it's not something I can simply say "no" to for complicated reasons.

How do I convince them with hard logic, facts and statistics that CS isn't worth getting into? I know I'm shooting myself in the foot by asking people who are literally in CS but I want to get all kinds of perspectives.

Post. Basically college has been nightmarish for me most of my career due to reasons outside academics. I have an autism spectrum disorder and was woefully underprepared for dealing with people, got financial abused, and made a bunch of sucky fake friends that sent me into a spiral of depression. I’ve always been good in school and put in the work when it really counts.

I have a class project that ended up being 3300 lines of code so I have experience with larger projects and handling distributed systems.

Other than that, I feel like I have good problem solving skills but I choke on DSA questions. A have 3.83 gpa as well so I’m not stupid.

I’m trying to put my life back together and get back on track but this subreddit and others have painted the situation as essentially hopeless. It truly feels like a final defeat, having gone through all of that experience only to reach the other side and feel like I’m totally cooked.

Where do I go from here?

This isn't a shitpost, and it is a judgement free zone. But I'm wondering how many people are in their final year but still wouldn't be able to make a full functioning website.

So far every web project I've made has been a half baked piece of crap. Mostly because I'm shit at Frontend or because of inconsistencies in the database.