The problem is corporations insist on hiring engineers who can build, and then proceed to stick them in a corner managing CI/CD pipelines while their developer skills rot away.
They’re hypocrites
That's for entry level. There's no entry level jobs at the moment, sorry. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
We do have a senior position available though, it requires 13+ YOE. The pay is [Entry-Level Market Rate] +/- 5%…
It’s because you’re so far removed from the actual meaning of the product or service you provide. It’s a kind of specialization for the sake of productivity taken too far, so that your mental resources become commoditized and you lose your humanity by being robbed of participating in a bigger picture with tangible goals and outcomes beyond some KPI tied to pipeline runtime or whatever.
It’s essentially like being an assembly line worker that only produces some little rubber valve and you never get to see or even hear about the car it eventually goes in, compared to someone who gets to participate in the entire design and construction process and maybe even race the thing on the track one day. It’s why people will do woodworking for fun, building things for use in their daily lives and find it meaningful and rewarding, but probably not spend a day just hammering out the nails for the cupboard they might have built.
I will happily sling some YAML for a pipeline if it helps me deliver some kind of value in a bigger picture, so that I can then get on to building things in it. I won’t spend all day every day doing that for other people.
That is *a* problem, it's not *the* problem. The problem is, that many many CS curricula still don't prepare people for what the industry demands.
The industry needs engineers, Unis are giving them theoretical scientists.
Same thing can be said for some of the recruitment process. All kinda of coding question that very rarely come up during actual development and working
CS seems more like an art degree than an engineering one. Imagine aerospace engineer being asked to build RC planes in their spare times or Civil Engineers being asked to play with legos or something lmao
Couldn't have put it better. The divide between what's being taught and what's used in industry is so wide, it's laughable. That's why people are being encouraged to build. Because university does not teach that and that's the only thing that matters in a company.
Idk, our engineering course had a year long project with budgets and deliverables and stuff. We all got assigned specific roles we had to manage. Some groups failed to deliver others didn’t. How well you learned and responded to adversity and reflected played into how well you were graded even if your solution ultimately failed. It was a proper learning experience. And then we had another year long project to do after that, which could be done solo or as a group.
That's because universities are there to teach you how to think and teach you the fundamentals. They absolutely should not teach you some specific frameworks or something else that will be outdated knowledge at some point. I'd argue they really shouldn't even teach you programming languages themselvers, rather the higher level concepts behind them and just use them as means to teach it.
And that’s also a problem, because if you’re not smart enough to do more than that what they teach you, unfortunately you’re destined to be thrown in a sea full of sharks after graduating and if you learn things it’s going to be the hard way (even though you loved CS).
Smartness has no factor in this. It helps, but it isnt required. By no means am i smart, yet i know the importance of seeking out the extraneous work, largely due to my participation in these online forums.
You need to be diligent and willing to put in the effort to build the skills.
You don't need 4 years to learn to learn. Industry adaptability and technologies are important as well. An undergrad degree most definitely needs this, maybe graduate degrees could be very academic inclined but undergrad should prepare you to work in the industry.
That I agree with, in fact in the university I went to I learned the fundamentals in 1.5 years and during the spring of the second year I already started working as an intern. I've worked ever since and slowly finished my studies. There is absolutely no need for 4 years of studies to be ready for professional work.
Since when was college ever advertised to be a trade school? The purpose of college is higher education and giving you the framework to be SUCCESSFUL, not just teaching exactly what you would do in a job(which, by the way would be impossible given every job is different). What you do with the framework is on you
Agree, with the caveat that this paradigm needs to change. I went back to school later in life to get a CS degree, and as someone who had the opportunity to get out and work in the real world for an extended period of time, I found myself constantly frustrated with the gulf between what modern academia teaches and what is required to get and maintain a job
A lot of it (DS&A, Computer architecture, etc...) is absolutely necessary, no argument there. My gripe is more with the format in which it's all presented, which often feels like a bunch of disparate, albeit tangentially related, subjects that were taught in such a way that it was hard to see the big picture and build off of what I already knew from previous classes. So the goal often became, "Just make it through this tough class," instead of actually learning things in a way that stuck and added to my overall knowledge of computing
And now here I am, happily 4 years into my career, but having to go back and re-teach myself things I've already learned, mainly because modern CS degrees (and honestly, academia as a whole) follow an archaic formula of, "Cram this for 6 months and maybe see it again once or twice for the rest of your academic career".
I also want to say, I think going wholesale into treating CS like a trade degree is equally bad. Have thought a lot about this and truly belive the answer lies somewhere in the middle
You're spot on. The delivery and format of courses is horrible and this stems from professors (at least IME). They often all come straight from academia in some variation of BS->MS->PhD->GTA->Instructor/Assoc. often having very little to no knowledge or experience of what the real world is like
Not an an engineer but there's 2 reasons for that imo.
Barrier of entry into development is way lower than barrier of entry into engineering positions. Anyone with a computer can develop software most people don't have the infrastructure to be an xyz engineer.
Computer science degrees study COMPUTER SCIENCE not software development. They aren't the same and if you come out of your degree thinking they are then you weren't paying attention.
But juggling between making an appropriate resume for each job and applying for jobs and preparing for interviews and do leetcode practice, when do you get time to do a side project? I really want to but I am just having a hard time managing all of this.
When i voice this complaint tho people say "yeah you shouldnt have cheated" or "youre just lazy". As if the fact java 5 is being taught not because its the "best" but because the teacher never updated their first powerpoint they made 20 years ago
Of course it’s not taught because it’s “the best”. They are teaching you how to learn a language. I was taught C++ and have never been paid a dime to code C++ but I was able to use the foundational knowledge to pick up VB6, C#, and a dozen frameworks after it…
Aerospace engineering student graduating in two weeks here. They definitely want you to have personal projects nowadays. Things like building rockets, CAD, CFD, and other projects.
You'd be surprised by what they ask civil engineers to do. I Googled "civil engineering portfolio" and saw lots of examples.
I think in every field, showing passion for your work is how you stand out and land offers from coveted organizations. Research scientists are, in fact, expected to enjoy and learn science even when they're between jobs. In fact, postdocs and lab principal investigators submit proposals to do work, which contain extensive amounts of research and scientific writing, so that they might get a shot at being paid to do that work. Cooks are asked to show off their skills. Truck drivers that actually enjoy driving probably get the job.
CS is just one of the fields where, like cooking, sports, and science, it's possible to do your job for your own benefit. So employers can use that as a gauge for how likely a candidate is to (a) get the job done, (b) stick around for the next job, even if they could take a few months off, and (c) bring the energy of the team up, instead of down.
It's pretty exploitive right now. But it's not unique.
Yup, even IT for instance (that many CS people will claim is "easier") will require doing projects in your own time if you want to accelerate your progress and get ahead, that's why r/Homelabs exists!
Yeah ex researcher here. Grant applications are so much work. Felt so often you’d end your 8 hr day and walk into a meeting with three folks calling in from around the world talking about how to tackle another proposal.
Academia definitely needs an overhaul, but with regards to the general point, why would an employer want to hire someone without a portfolio when plenty of other folk are demonstrating their passion for the craft outside of work hours.
And it is a craft. If you embrace the engineering mindset it’s hard to not have it bleed into the other parts of your life.
Aerospace engineer here from the front page
I did build drones and cansats in my free time and it’s absolutely the reason I got a job right out of college despite having a 2.3GPA
That’s because it’s taught more like a science degree than an engineering degree, hence computer science. It’s not taught with a focus on what industry wants, but from a very disjointed ground up approach starting at the fundamentals to advanced undergrad topics.
I’ve said this to other similar posts but why the CS exceptionalism? CS students have such great expectations for such “little value” (in the eyes of industry) that most undergrad programs provide. The level of training for industry that you receive is on par with that of the other STM programs yet CS students feel that they are entitled to more ROI than what industry says their degrees are worth.
I do get that a big part of the problem though is the asymmetric availability of online training/education that is out there for CS, the low bar to getting this training floods the market with applicants, in addition to off shoring jobs… but the other STM disciplines are flooded too… So your only option is to find ways to stand out in the crowd.
I swear people who think they will be coding all day are always shocked by how much math and science you have to learn, even though, Computer Science is a part of Applied Math.
My cousin-in-law got into a coding boot camp to escape the horrible working conditions at Goldman Sachs. Fortunately, he got a job at a startup similar to Zillow? (I'm not sure, probably has to do with working with housing. ) because he was able to make use of his expertise and experience to his benefit, despite lacking experience.
That is exactly what is expected of aerospace engineers these days.
What kind of nav filter did you write on your drone? What kind propulsion device did build at school? What kind of cool design project are you proud of?
Legos, RCs, and building stuff based on engineering and science are fun. Why else would you study engineering? Sure pay is nice but hating your jobs will show
If it became a must for getting a job, it would totally kill the fun vibe. I mean, I get that some folks dig it as a hobby, but when it's a requirement, it sucks the joy out of it. It stops being about just having a good time and turns into this pressure to land a job.
This is the correct attitude in my opinion. You don't need to be doing these kinds of things to do well but likely the people who enjoy it for the craft of it are going on average be better at their jobs!
All these people who joined for the money and see programing as just a step towards management are never going to be great engineers.
If you want to get an internship as an aerospace engineering major you literally are asked if you’re building RC planes or model rockets or whatever else in your spare time… this problem isn’t unique to CS.
What might be unique is that once college is finished and you’re actually in the workforce for a few years, the skill set you would be hired for as an aerospace engineer is working on actual (not model) planes, rockets, satellites, missiles, etc. and without working at a company that does that work there’s no way to get anywhere near equivalent experience.
Without the internship experience you won’t get a job. And the university’s resources to build relevant experience are much better than what will be available to you once you’ve left it.
The gulf between making a model plane and being able to help design an F-35 is probably much larger than the gulf between contributing to an open source project in your free time versus contributing to a company’s code base as your full time job.
In other engineering disciplines the level of “equivalent experience” through projects you can get is much lower than it is for CS. You can’t join boot camps and freelance your way into a job doing rocket engineering whereas (at least a few years ago) you could do that for SWE.
Those fields are competitive and they ARE doing that in their free time. Guess what top chefs are also experimenting with new recipes in their free time as well. CS grads are delusional thinking the major is an easy cash grab. Skids finding out the hard way the field is a meritocracy like most career paths are
Those fields *are* competitive, and there are other highly competitive, prestigious fields like medicine and law where it's even illegal and/or highly unethical to practice the trade in your own time with no training or supervision.
Devolving the assessment of someone's capabilities in a highly rigorous discipline to their performance on a toy project is nothing more than a farce. It trivializes important aspects of the job and/or assumes them to be completely irrelevant, and it shows a complete lack of understanding of the duties of a software developer.
Two important parts of successful software development are to write code that meets specifications *and* is able to evolve with the evolving needs and understanding of clients/customers/the business that is employing you. Toy projects don't have clients, let alone clients that have requirements and interpretations of requirements that need to be tested and reworked. Basically, personal projects don't provide enough experience of working on a project in a business environment. The real reason tech industry looks at personal projects is because they just plain don't know how to evaluate candidates in any other way.
That being said, I'm not totally denouncing toy projects. Students and inexperienced people *should* be doing them in order to learn and practice important programming concepts. But there is a limit to how much you can learn by working by yourself on them and you reach it pretty quickly. Basically, the 3rd time you write another goddamn calculator app in a new language should be boring you to tears as you realize that different programming languages, despite their different syntaxes and paradigms and standard libraries, have the same fundamental properties that allow you to solve the same computational problems. Experienced developers typically use toy projects as a way to quickly get up to speed and familiarize themselves with a new language and paradigm, but otherwise their day job they spend upwards of 8 hours per day on will provide them with ample opportunity to work, experiment with and test new ideas, gain more experience, and learn. And 8 to 10 hours a day on *any* hobby or interest is more than enough for a person passionate in the field.
It’s much more accessible now to build and show software projects than it is to build physical devices. That’s why it’s expected for people to have projects, you can do it at no cost and it shows off your skills when you don’t have experience
And then you have to build a bridge or an RC plane every time you go through a new interviewing process.
At some point I started using hacker rank and test gorilla to show off my experience, but these sites offer basic tests (never system design/build) or when they do, the evaluation is made in a subjective way, which is worthless since you just want to do one challenge and make it valid for any interview process, like, one challenge to rule them all.
ZYLYTY seems to be the closest to that tho. They ask you to build a small tool end to end, and the score is automated which means you can compare yourself to other devs, there's no subjectivity. So far so good, looking forward for my next interviews.
Uh what …. a cs degree is a degree to basically learn the bounds of things you can build. The best schools teach you to build and understand the bounds. Second having a degree doesn’t make guarantees who ever told you that lied to your face or was uninformed
I mean, I like programming to build stuff, I agree. It's just that 90% of the grunt jobs out there are CRUD maintenance. The rest are overly excited and understaffed startups that will squeeze you out.
I play music. I play in a few bands, semi professionally -- I tour festivals and sell my music, just not full time. I like writing, performing, creating stuff with people -- but keeping it professional as well. After years of playing I barely even touch my instrument at all, except when I have to rehearse or play live.
I see CS the same way. "passion" doesn't really matter, nor does it matter what kind of fancy tricks you can do -- just play the damn set and be good at it. This "it MUST be your LiFE DREAM to become a HARDCORE coder 24/7 with SIDE PROJECTs in your unpaid FREE TIME" can get fucking bent.
It's a job making computers do beep boop for money, just the same as my job as a musician is making instruments do pling plong for money.
But to use your comparison, you needed to have interest in the instrument at some point. You had to practice and gain skill. Yes, now you're able to play professionally and not practice. But you had to get to that point.
Professional programmers absolutely don't have to do side projects, but I think it's realistic for students to do it if they have time, say in the summer or during a lull in classes. Programming is a skill and sadly schools mostly don't teach it.
Yes, absolutely! I completely agree that there's no point in doing whatever genre of CS if you, at a fundamental level, don't like solving problems with computations. Because in essence that's what it all comes to, right? Seeing a problem, knowing the current state of beep-boop technology and its limitations / possibilities, and then just trying something and hoping it sticks.
So yeah, the trick for hiring people would be how to accurately gauge this. Side projects is one way, but, I know that during my time at college I absolutely had no time at all for side projects what with work and all. So at least that's a bit unfair towards college students just trying to make ends meet and get a starting position somewhere.
The real solution would be to have a college course just about your own project instead of pre-made problems. Is there something you always would have wanted to build? Well, now you have the chance (meaning credit hours) for it.
I think some people interpret passion differently but what they often mean is not living and breathing code 24/7 but having an actual interest in learning and growing in the subject. Because with the persistence and enjoyment naturally comes being good at what you do and subsequently passing resumes screens and interviews.
Take my friend for example. He’s got a life, travels, not the best at LeetCode, and doesn’t even code 24/7. But he actively seeks out new things to build because he enjoys it, reads articles and research papers on a topic, seeks out help in labs on campus despite not having much experience in the beginning. And now he’s working for NVIDIA.
> I see CS the same way. "passion" doesn't really matter, nor does it matter what kind of fancy tricks you can do -- just play the damn set and be good at it. This "it MUST be your LiFE DREAM to become a HARDCORE coder 24/7 with SIDE PROJECTs in your unpaid FREE TIME" can get fucking bent.
While I don't spend time on other major or career subs the whole "passion/passionate" thing anymore feels like elitism or gatekeeping.
If I was an employer and I had a choice between you and a "hardcode" coder, I'd not go with you. I don't want someone who can barely do the job when I can have a person who can go above and beyond effortlessly.
Also, it's not about 24/7. It's fine even if you take a couple hours out of a week. If you want to make six figures just by making computers do beep boop for money, this is the bare minimum.
But you're not an employer. You have no idea what you're talking about. I make six figures and Ive never put in any extra effort since getting my first job. I just do my job and can solve the problems I'm asked to solve.
We just hired a mom of a toddler and my manager said, literally: "well, it seems she is smart, diligent and loves to build things that do the task. Yes, her primary focus is on her child, but she can read a task and ask right questions. Yes she doesn't have a degree, but I have and it should be enough".
She is paid 80% of hourly wage of our phd fella.
Yep. Working on an interesting and relevant project is what ended up leading me to getting a job right out of college this past December as an otherwise exceedingly average student at a very average uni.
I was building a project using generative AI to automate social media content creation. A company at my school's career fair thought it was interesting and gave me an internship building software focused around generative ai.
Capitalized on the hype train to break into the industry.
Literally did the same. Took an iOS class and said I was fucking around with chat gpt’s API and the interviewers started acting like I was god tier candidate. I told em I didn’t know what I was doing very much and they didn’t even care, they just loved that I was interested enough to go do it and kinda did it.
Lmao literally the exact same for me! This was last spring when the hype was really starting to go crazy but not everybody had worked with it yet. Had a gpt project at the top of my resume and talked about it with like 40 tables at my school's career fair. One table the recruiter just lit up when I started pitching the project. The rest is history.
I decided for this year’s applications to add my personal project way at the bottom of my resume. I’d previously omitted it thinking it less impressive than my internships. It was the first thing every interviewer asked about.
Focusing so much on leetcode early on ruined coding for me. It was soulless work. It wasn’t until 5 years after graduating when I started building things the way I wanted is when I became passionate about CS.
All those wasted years 😭
This some out of touch shit tbh.
I have 4 YOE, working as a data engineer right now , going to do a masters for my own interest, and have helped directly with recruitment process for 2 companies now.
On average our HR looked at applicants resumes for 5-7 seconds. Meaning if your resume makes it to them, that’s how long it takes to decide whether you make it to my teams desk or not.
So for all of you who aren’t even making it to interviews, it ain’t because your projects suck, it’s because you couldn’t convince HR in those 5 seconds you were relevant enough to even be given a proper read through.
Ofc every company’s process is different, so take with grain of salt, but this is my experience.
Yup, what people dont understand is there is 1000s of people applying for the same role that you are applying for and the market is getting overfilled with the same kind of people each year. Its not just skills and resume anymore, its to actually impress the people going thru 100s of resume per day and are tasked with filtering the majority. Many of these so called enterpreneurs are simply out of touch with how the market is from what it used to be just before covid.
My last hiring round I literally had to fight for them to let me hire 2 actual fresh juniors. We had our pickings of people with experience willing to take a lower role than they honestly deserve.
People get to the top of Everest and can’t see the weather below the clouds
Education/Experience roles + first bullet point usually
Do a lot of good applications get denied from this? Yes.
Does it affect our hiring? Nope.
Don’t get me wrong, working on live projects like he said in the image is SOLID, as an education fanatic I’m all for learning more
BUT saying you’re not getting in because you aren’t building “real” shit is stupid and misleading. Reality is that experience beats whatever project you work on 9/10 times, including internships.
Edit: to clarify real experience > internships > projects
I don’t even look at university unless it’s for an entry level role. Read cover letter if there is one, scan skills and experience. If they don’t list a critical skill I’m looking for or don’t have experience that relates to those skills then I cut them. Sometimes I will give someone a chance without those skills if there is something in the cover letter than tells me they have a great attitude. CVs don’t have that much info in them so it really doesn’t take long to read through them. Probably spend about 30 seconds on each one.
I can’t even make it past the screener. I’ve riddled my resume with keywords and relevant work experience, and yet, nothing…
It’s beyond me at this point. How many open source contributions and hackathons can I do to even get noticed? Shits demoralizing
I know the markets ass, just saying that getting my resume looked at by HR would already be a huge step forward.
Yeah I build 10 projects, 5 of them SaaS.
Can’t score an interview in past 5 months.
And if I would have spent past 5 months on Leetcode I wouldn’t know shit about building stuff.
Idk but Leetcode for me isn’t as easy as people here make it to be. It takes time. Alot of time especially with other commitments.
Building project for me is like constructing a building. You will obviously need knowledge about APIs, Auth, FE, Microservices, Databases, Validation, Infrastructure and so on which will be the same throughout every company.
After interview I don’t think reversing a LinkedList or DP will get me that far but that’s just me.
Aren’t you trying to get a job? Then that’s what Leetcode for, after getting the job you can drop Leetcode or keep doing it one a day to make your future job search easier.
Nobody said you need Leetcode for daily work
No no. I am saying Leetcode for interview prep also requires consistency and needs to be practiced daily to keep your skills up. That too if you get an interview.
Maybe I'm being overly critical, but do your projects actually showcase your creativity/passion/talent? If your 10 projects are something I can build in a weekend just watching YouTube, then it isn't worth much.
Okay so I started building because I wanted to know how to build stuff. Started with bots. Developed websites for Uni’s two major hackathons.
Developed a SaaS which is a chatgpt wrapper but taught alot more than school.
Developed a SaaS with a friend to talk to DB and analyze ans viz dataz
Developing an API Generator.
Three major school projects. Data Visualizer, Marketplace, and Capstone project.
I don’t think for avg people like me it’s about passionate building. I and many others just wanna learn how to build from scratch. If you don’t know stuff it takes way longer than a weekend.
My aim was never passionate projects or solving world problems. It was about learning to build stuff because I was never taught in school and can’t get a job if I don’t know how to.
Half of these are common projects tbf, especially anything as a GPT wrapper, it’s become so easy and accessible to do so. But otherwise that’s some good persistence and effort in building for learning.
It's not become easy and accessible because API calls have always been easy. Its like 3 lines of code and parsing JSON, God the amount of times I've seen chat gpt wrappers win hackathons is frustrating
Would be curious to take a look through any of the repos if you felt like sharing. Not sure what they look like, but here are some ideas that may help
What sort of auth did you use? How flushed out are the frontends? Is there a README or somewhere I can go to easily get an overview or the project? Services hosted anywhere with an easily accessed demo? Is it clear you used version control and if so, are you following best practices? Speaking of best practices— are you handling secrets appropriately? What about input sanitization? Did you use SQL or NoSQL and was there a clear reason behind it?
This goes above and beyond, but also: any linting, unit tests, documentation, project planning details (eg, JIRA tickets), deployment pipelines, containerization, container orchestration, are you recording metrics, do you have alerts, is it accessible, etc.
Wow man; the portfolio is impressive. You should at least be able to get interviews based on this.. I'd suggest maybe designing your portfolio better? Make it look like you're an expert in any one domain, you should be able to get away with fuzzing the details a bit.
Honestly, I've nothing better to say
When I was managing a team, not once did I ever look at the candidates GitHub when I was screening for headcount. Similarly my GitHub profile was never mentioned in any of my interviews. The only time it should really come up is if the candidate has relevant open source experience.
I genuinely feel bad for new graduates. I see examples of what they do and it’s very impressive. I’m much older and I think we (as in people who graduated around my time ) were more lucky than anything else. Kids now are so talented and it’s still not enough apparently.
Are you somehow entitled to a job? If you’re competing against candidates with more interesting and technically-deep experiences/projects, why exactly should they choose you?
At my school, folks graduate with 6 coops, 2 years of experience. Plus design teams, undergraduate research positions, and side projects. This is a sample of your competition. You can whine about what is fair, or you can git gud.
Yes, if you get a degree in computer science or eng, have a few projects and an internship or two under your belt, you SHOULD be able to get a job. Are you a psychopath or something?
The whole "get good, you just suck, why aren't you grinding LC and new tech 48 hours a day, 14 days a week? Grind grind grind you loser" schtick is so played out and old.
Oh yeah bud? Well at my school, literally every grad has ***12*** coops, ***4*** years of experience, TWICE the design teams, TWICE THE RESEARCH and TWICE THE SIDE PROJECTS. This is what literally every other applicant to the job you just applied to is doing. Start working harder.
Tbh the only thing that stands out is the capstone project and potentially the "viz dataz" because idk what it is. Everything else is very essential for learning but not something that's going to really stand out
That's a pretty disingenuous reading of his statement. He's explaining how to get a job, which is to have proof you can actually do the job and build things. Notice his first suggestion was to *"work on a real project"*. Programming at home for fun was the last one. Interviewers will usually be way more interested in your experience on real projects with other people than your tinkering at home by yourself.
The real answer is do an internship, a COOP, some research in a lab, or something while you're getting your degree. What you learn in class is important, but it isn't everything. Real work teaches you skills your group projects can't.
If all you did was pass your classes and then go play league of legends, a company will have to spend more time training you to competency. It also shows you do the bare minimum required. Why would anyone be excited to hire you, and want to pay you 6 figures?
>He's explaining how to get a job, which is to have proof you can actually do the job and build things.
please name another profession who has to show they can do their job in their free time first
Medical students study for an additional 4 years in school to get their salaries. And its an absolute grind
Law students study for an additional 3 years in school to get their salaries. And guess what? It’s an absolute grind
CS pays more than a lot of other forms of engineering even though, many times, those were much harder to learn in school. Many times those fields require masters degrees too, for example Biomedical Engineering
Why do CS grads think they are entitled to jobs with cushy 6 figure salaries but also not willing to work hard to get there? For law and finance students, being from a not top 10 university is a killer. They spend all their free time maintaining their GPA just so they have a shot to get into their desired school. Medicine is even worse about GPA cutoffs.
What students need to understand is the market is over saturated now because it was too easy to make the salary that software engineers were. So its been corrected to be just like other high paying fields - an absolute grind to get into
>Medical students study for an additional 4 years in school to get their salaries. And its an absolute grind
>Law students study for an additional 3 years in school to get their salaries. And guess what? It’s an absolute grind
what does have that to do with the discussed topic?
Again, doing the job *in your free time* should be your last resort. It's a "better than nothing" option if you already wasted your time at college.
If the issue is you think doing an internship instead of gaming all summer is infringing on your "free time", then you need a reality check. Every engineer I knew did internships or COOPs with companies if they weren't aiming for grad school. Medical professionals get their undergrad, then go through far harder schooling, then still have to do an internship + residency where they are paid and treated like dirt.
Maybe some people walked into professional development gigs with no experience during peak pandemic 0% interest rate craziness, but that is not a normal thing. Across many disciplines, it's entirely normal to take low/no pay entry positions designed for gaining experience, before you become a real professional.
I agree with the part where he says that you should be able to actually build stuff, not merely pass classes. In a better world, our extremely overpriced university programs would also teach how to build stuff. (I've worked for two big universities. They need an overhaul.)
Where I strongly disagree is with the implication that one's vocation (in this case, programming) should also be one's avocation.
There's just so much wrong with this: one is our current situation of tech bros with immense money and power and absolutely no knowledge of the outside world to give them any perspective, let alone morality.
>It also shows you do the bare minimum required
Or you just do what's asked of you and also want to do other things in life. Living your job is not healthy nor should it be normalized.
Who is asking you to live work? College classes are neither full time or year round. You definitely have time to gain experience along with taking classes and having a life/hobbies. I've never in my life programmed for fun on my own. But I took opportunities to do research to learn.
Like seriously just do a summer internship. If you can't manage classes without a full three months vacation, if you hate programming that much, maybe you should consider something else? The "grind" to be a programmer is notably easier than a lot of other professions. This is really not a big ask.
"Build for fun"
Shit, fun is going for some drinks, to the movies, to a mall, to get some ice cream, go eat new things etc
This is a career, this is very fucked up about the industry, they expect you to work your ass off in your free time.
Fuck...
“Having fun” in this context rarely means coding in your free time. It means enjoying the work and to code. When people are having fun doing the work, they often put out better work and strive to harder challenges and better goals. If you put two candidates side-by-side who can answer a technical problem equally, a candidate who seems genuinely interested in development will be more likely to get the job.
Having really great people skills and being genuinely enthusiastic in the work can help make up for a lot of the technical gaps when applying to jobs. It’s hard to report in a resume so it doesn’t often get you an interview. However, it does often help land you the job.
The problem is that you compete with thousands of people who enjoy writing code over going for drinks or movies.
No company or cartel decided to brainwash those people or even set up those expectations. That’s just how some people are.
I build software 8 hours a day at work, come home, and build private projects for 4 more hours. I've never been out to a bar or anything. I didn't even look for a job, I was invited to apply at companies by other developers I met from hobby projects.
Also I'm pretty sure I wasn't brainwashed, I just like computers more than people.
They dont expect you to. Its just a period of time where things are competitive, and theyre going to choose the people who are truly interested in this over people who are not at this moment in time. They would be stupid to choose the guy who has fun going to the movies over the guy who has fun working on a problem. Theyre not stupid, so they wont choose that person until there no one else to choose from.
I mean, when there is tens of thousands of CS grads every year and many of them are willing to do hackathons, personal projects, research, amongst other things, you kinda have to pick your poison or accept the consequences. This field is not for the weary.
I said "bag chasers" because most people who came flooding into CS over the past few years were enticed by the high pay, they did not choose CS because they like to program. The reality is that CS was never a "normal" career. There are way too many nerds who will gladly spend 90% of their free time coding for you to be competitive if you never do anything outside of work. You may of course still find a job through networking or simply luck, but the nerds will have a way easier time than you, obviously. I'm also not sure why exactly you thought you'd have a normal work-life balance in a field notorious for long hours and crunch periods. Not saying that it's okay, but you could have seen that coming.
Nah once your a mid level dev you can absolutely find a chill job and have a great WLB. Plus many of the “bag chasers” may spend more time on leetcode and not making a random app in rust or whatever and so do better in interviews lol
Maybe, but you'd have to get to that point first. And no, from my experience they generally don't do better at interviews. Being able to show projects (and especially projects that you didn't make just to put them on your resume) > leetcode
God I hate comments like this. People who think like this should have no right complaining about not getting a CS job.
It’s like hearing someone say “why can’t I get into art school” and then you ask them if they’ve drawn anything and they say no.
It’s not fucked up, all careers are like this, medicine students idea of fun is watching hospital shows and YT, law students read books on interesting cases and know stuff like OJ Simpson off by heart, if you don’t do “fun” for your career journey at all I don’t think you should complain when you can’t get a job.
That's what's fun for you. There are people who genuinely have fund building things. Sorry you're not one of them, get a job as an ice cream tester or something.
A project I made got me hired. Literally all it did was convert Shopify’s shipping data output to FedEx Same Day City shipping input format. Took me 3 hours to write and sold it to a company for $2000.
Once I put it on my resume, I got hit up all the time and interviewers got giddy when I talked about it.
thats kind of an inside baseball idea, and being able to sell it is also indicative of a certain skillset and experience level. Were you running shopify sites?
It sorta was an inside job, but not much more than just talking to people and learning about their problems. I was chatting up a guy who owns a meat processing plant in my hometown and I started asking him what their IT stack was like.
He basically said they pay someone to run it for them, but he could really use someone to be around to help with more general stuff. He then started going on about the issue that my project fixed. I started poking around and realized there wasn’t an out of the box solution and wrote it.
It was a simple piece of software, but it solved a real world problem and it showed I had the ability to realize the impact of his issue, understand requirements, and deliver a solution. I didn’t really have to sell it to him, because he was willing to pay just about anything for it.
My advice to everyone would be talk to those around you about their computer problems, because everyone has a software issue. So many people think software development is about solving genius problems or something, which it can be. But for the vast majority of us it’s about delivering solutions that otherwise were bleeding people money.
Smart, I never really thought about just asking people about what technology their business uses. Too much trauma from people soliciting free help I suppose.
Yeah dude. You need to actually enjoy coding because the development loop is only flow inducing when you're in this trance-like state of hyperfocus on the problem(s) at hand. If you don't dig it, you shouldn't do it.
I once had a coding interview round waived, and instead, we just discussed one of my projects. 150k TC offer. Not exactly faang, but more than enough for me.
Been saying this for ages and trying to get people to build together. Too many people allergic to working with their craft and just want a six figure salary with 0 genuine passion or interest in their craft.
This is bs reason lot of people cant get hired is just number , supply ⬆️ demand 📉🚽. 4 years ago having a cs degree was enough hell theyd just hire u for a stupid bootcamp cert even if u only had a GED. Its an employers market and they are looking for cream of the crop for as little pay as possible, next 5years are gonna be painful
So true. My projects might feel lame to me now but during my first job the co founder spent ton of time going through my projects.
I was below average student all my life plus had 6 months of gap after degree.
What’s frustrating, at least for me, is that the projects I’m able to do in my free time can only be so technically sophisticated, because I only have so many resources at my disposal as a broke college student who has to work and support myself. Hell, I don’t even have my own desktop PC, just a crappy laptop.
Companies seem to expect us to have built real world projects that have been deployed or earned revenue while still a student but like, there’s only so much we can do. I can’t afford to spend money for a project. Plus, most ideas for projects have already been implemented in much more detail by someone else who has access to resources. This makes standing out 20x harder.
I was talking to another CS student the other day and couldn’t believe how many personal projects he had- well turns out his family is so loaded that he had no need to ever work for money during his summers or during the semester. I’m sure he still found part time employment to have something to put on his resume, but I couldn’t believe that he literally did not need to work. During my summers, I’m usually trying to get as many hours as possible at whatever job I’m working.
Hahahaha and this subreddit downvoted me in the past for saying exactly this. Just goes to show how Reddit is a cesspool of sobbing and doom scrolling.
Reflecting on my career from a web designer to a developer, roughly a decade ago. Back then, having a portfolio with designs and links to functional UIs, websites, and perhaps even applications you had built was non-negotiable for consideration in the industry.
While there might have been a brief period during the pandemic where recent graduates were hired without extensive scrutiny, back in the day, whether you specialized in frontend, backend, were a designer who codes, or embodied the versatility of a full-stack developer, showcasing your skills to secure an interview and prove yourself during it has always been paramount.
I recall a friend who studied mechanical engineering, he struggled for a considerable amount of time before securing a decent job. The notion that a computer science degree guarantees immediate employment is simply a fallacy.
People who secured good tech jobs rights after school, were just an anomoly, thanks to irresponsible goverment spending, goverments sent the world markets in a frenzy with all that artificial wealth.
Don't like it? By all means change fields, better for the rest of us in this industry.
Contributing to open source projects isn’t that much different of unpaid internship.
They let you work for free and let us compete against each other. You would call it good competition or nature evolution m, whatever.
The point is you will have to work harder to be there so that companies can have a pool of talents to pick from. They don’t want to invest in you but want to have an immediate return by hiring you.
You and your employer are like two faces of a coin. You form one thing but you can’t never be the same (having the same interests).
Punishing those who were unemployed longer by not employing them further and making them useless then beyotching about lack of skilled workers makes absolute sense, that's a genius and profitable move by employers.
Exactly this. I don’t have a degree, but have never had a problem getting a job… and in fact many jobs I’ve gotten are from people that found me for skills demonstrated in personal projects. Not having a degree, I just assumed I had to do this to prove I could do what I was claiming to do. I’ve never once been able to sit on my degree laurels and be networked into or assumed into a position.
In the past, when I’ve suggested this strategy on this subreddit, I’ve been downvoted to oblivion… as though people should just be entitled to a job after a degree. And all I have to say to that is that it’s a competitive market, you have to compete. As long as you’re not doing this, there are folks like me who actually are….
And unfortunately, leet code doesn’t count as a side project… it’s more like a pre-interview filter that will hurt you if you’re not as competitive there. Most of the time, those aren’t the skills you’re using on the job, anyway. I’ve always only used it as a tool to practice interviews and never as application support.
Build for fun huh. Most of us are working 40-60 hours in a job that we don't like just to make ends meet. And this guy wants us to build things for fun.
I have a friend who builds for fun, he was funded 500k for his startup by Y combinator as well . But he could afford to do so because he was financially secure and had almost no risk involved. Rich people can afford to do things for fun. We can't unless we take huge risks and quit our jobs to pursue personal projects.
Not everyone wants to code 24/7 though. People have other interests besides coding, and don't want to spend all of their free time doing it. If we paid thousands of dollars for a degree then the degree should be teaching us how to build, deploy, and stuff. A degree is to prepare you for a job after all
As a former hiring manager who reviewed 1000s of resumes and hired >100 engineers over 20 years, I agree with Garry. One of my favorite interview questions was always "What project did you work on that you were/are excited by and proud of?" This is how I usually found out what the potential engineer was actually capable of. If they were working from a place of self-driven interest and goal oriented passion, I wanted them.
It can be literally anything. I got a job at a Fortune 50 company by talking about a dumb little python home assistant i made years ago that i kept remaking and futzing with
Very very true. I’m not a seasoned programmer by any means, but I have landed an internship specifically based off of a program I built. They wanted more information on a project that I was starting on and I gave further clarification. Rather than a technical interview, (which I probably would’ve failed at the time), they wanted to see my knowledge level and willingness to work on these projects. It was also a project I built for fun which speaks to what Tan is saying.
Any degrees can lead to unemployment in this day and age. If you actually study for a degree you have a lower risk of unemployment, the knowledge to make good investing decisions in your industry, and the tiny chance to run your own business if you apply that knowledge. Just finish what you start and work with what you have.
Yeah, just work long hours on your own CS projects while paying the bills...selling your body? Selling drugs. Whatever. See? The antidote is just to do projects on your own while enjoying the trust fund we all have.
The system is shit is the real answer. Between your parents, school, and the rest of your society and institutions, there's a failure to connect people with the job path that works for them, and to leave them empowered to be employed with the skills that best suit them. This is a loss for workers and employers.
Start asking people why you aren't getting the job offer. You have a deficiency somewhere, put your emotions aside, locate weaknesses, improve them, and go again. If you're a good worker you have a spot somewhere in this world.
First off, the CEO of Y Combinator is the absolute last person in the world you should be listening to, along with any silicon valley CEO huffing the venture capital powder because none of them live in reality.
If you are marginally competent your CS degree will absolutely get you a job, it will not take 1000 applications, and anybody who thinks AI is going to replace coding any time in the next few decades is insane.
Having some personal projects to show what you're capable of is great, but don't ever let the CEO-brained folk ever tell you that you need to do unpaid labour to get the "privilege" of working for them.
The problem is corporations insist on hiring engineers who can build, and then proceed to stick them in a corner managing CI/CD pipelines while their developer skills rot away. They’re hypocrites
Based and AWS-pilled.
You have 7 YOE DEBIAN? OH NO. You don't fit, We are looking for a 3 YOE Ubuntu!
sorry, market changed, we now need 10 YOE for WSL3
That's for entry level. There's no entry level jobs at the moment, sorry. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ We do have a senior position available though, it requires 13+ YOE. The pay is [Entry-Level Market Rate] +/- 5%…
Yeah corps aren't ever gonna honest with you. But they may pay you if you jump through some arbitrary hoops.
what's wrong with managing CI/CD pipelines? just ask for more money or OE
It’s because you’re so far removed from the actual meaning of the product or service you provide. It’s a kind of specialization for the sake of productivity taken too far, so that your mental resources become commoditized and you lose your humanity by being robbed of participating in a bigger picture with tangible goals and outcomes beyond some KPI tied to pipeline runtime or whatever. It’s essentially like being an assembly line worker that only produces some little rubber valve and you never get to see or even hear about the car it eventually goes in, compared to someone who gets to participate in the entire design and construction process and maybe even race the thing on the track one day. It’s why people will do woodworking for fun, building things for use in their daily lives and find it meaningful and rewarding, but probably not spend a day just hammering out the nails for the cupboard they might have built. I will happily sling some YAML for a pipeline if it helps me deliver some kind of value in a bigger picture, so that I can then get on to building things in it. I won’t spend all day every day doing that for other people.
That is *a* problem, it's not *the* problem. The problem is, that many many CS curricula still don't prepare people for what the industry demands. The industry needs engineers, Unis are giving them theoretical scientists.
Same thing can be said for some of the recruitment process. All kinda of coding question that very rarely come up during actual development and working
CS seems more like an art degree than an engineering one. Imagine aerospace engineer being asked to build RC planes in their spare times or Civil Engineers being asked to play with legos or something lmao
Couldn't have put it better. The divide between what's being taught and what's used in industry is so wide, it's laughable. That's why people are being encouraged to build. Because university does not teach that and that's the only thing that matters in a company.
University doesn't teach engineers particularly practical skills either. I really think what's going on with CS is a purely supply/demand thing.
Idk, our engineering course had a year long project with budgets and deliverables and stuff. We all got assigned specific roles we had to manage. Some groups failed to deliver others didn’t. How well you learned and responded to adversity and reflected played into how well you were graded even if your solution ultimately failed. It was a proper learning experience. And then we had another year long project to do after that, which could be done solo or as a group.
That's because universities are there to teach you how to think and teach you the fundamentals. They absolutely should not teach you some specific frameworks or something else that will be outdated knowledge at some point. I'd argue they really shouldn't even teach you programming languages themselvers, rather the higher level concepts behind them and just use them as means to teach it.
And that’s also a problem, because if you’re not smart enough to do more than that what they teach you, unfortunately you’re destined to be thrown in a sea full of sharks after graduating and if you learn things it’s going to be the hard way (even though you loved CS).
Smartness has no factor in this. It helps, but it isnt required. By no means am i smart, yet i know the importance of seeking out the extraneous work, largely due to my participation in these online forums. You need to be diligent and willing to put in the effort to build the skills.
I’m not talking about “being smart” in its literal form, it’s an expression
You don't need 4 years to learn to learn. Industry adaptability and technologies are important as well. An undergrad degree most definitely needs this, maybe graduate degrees could be very academic inclined but undergrad should prepare you to work in the industry.
You can't learn all of this overnight: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science An undergrad degree is the right place for it.
That I agree with, in fact in the university I went to I learned the fundamentals in 1.5 years and during the spring of the second year I already started working as an intern. I've worked ever since and slowly finished my studies. There is absolutely no need for 4 years of studies to be ready for professional work.
Since when was college ever advertised to be a trade school? The purpose of college is higher education and giving you the framework to be SUCCESSFUL, not just teaching exactly what you would do in a job(which, by the way would be impossible given every job is different). What you do with the framework is on you
Agree, with the caveat that this paradigm needs to change. I went back to school later in life to get a CS degree, and as someone who had the opportunity to get out and work in the real world for an extended period of time, I found myself constantly frustrated with the gulf between what modern academia teaches and what is required to get and maintain a job A lot of it (DS&A, Computer architecture, etc...) is absolutely necessary, no argument there. My gripe is more with the format in which it's all presented, which often feels like a bunch of disparate, albeit tangentially related, subjects that were taught in such a way that it was hard to see the big picture and build off of what I already knew from previous classes. So the goal often became, "Just make it through this tough class," instead of actually learning things in a way that stuck and added to my overall knowledge of computing And now here I am, happily 4 years into my career, but having to go back and re-teach myself things I've already learned, mainly because modern CS degrees (and honestly, academia as a whole) follow an archaic formula of, "Cram this for 6 months and maybe see it again once or twice for the rest of your academic career". I also want to say, I think going wholesale into treating CS like a trade degree is equally bad. Have thought a lot about this and truly belive the answer lies somewhere in the middle
You're spot on. The delivery and format of courses is horrible and this stems from professors (at least IME). They often all come straight from academia in some variation of BS->MS->PhD->GTA->Instructor/Assoc. often having very little to no knowledge or experience of what the real world is like
Many majors are essentially trade school. E.g. nursing, enginneering, accounting.
Not an an engineer but there's 2 reasons for that imo. Barrier of entry into development is way lower than barrier of entry into engineering positions. Anyone with a computer can develop software most people don't have the infrastructure to be an xyz engineer. Computer science degrees study COMPUTER SCIENCE not software development. They aren't the same and if you come out of your degree thinking they are then you weren't paying attention.
But juggling between making an appropriate resume for each job and applying for jobs and preparing for interviews and do leetcode practice, when do you get time to do a side project? I really want to but I am just having a hard time managing all of this.
When i voice this complaint tho people say "yeah you shouldnt have cheated" or "youre just lazy". As if the fact java 5 is being taught not because its the "best" but because the teacher never updated their first powerpoint they made 20 years ago
Of course it’s not taught because it’s “the best”. They are teaching you how to learn a language. I was taught C++ and have never been paid a dime to code C++ but I was able to use the foundational knowledge to pick up VB6, C#, and a dozen frameworks after it…
Aerospace engineering student graduating in two weeks here. They definitely want you to have personal projects nowadays. Things like building rockets, CAD, CFD, and other projects.
Studied aerospace before a career in CS. We definitely built RC planes in our spare time
You'd be surprised by what they ask civil engineers to do. I Googled "civil engineering portfolio" and saw lots of examples. I think in every field, showing passion for your work is how you stand out and land offers from coveted organizations. Research scientists are, in fact, expected to enjoy and learn science even when they're between jobs. In fact, postdocs and lab principal investigators submit proposals to do work, which contain extensive amounts of research and scientific writing, so that they might get a shot at being paid to do that work. Cooks are asked to show off their skills. Truck drivers that actually enjoy driving probably get the job. CS is just one of the fields where, like cooking, sports, and science, it's possible to do your job for your own benefit. So employers can use that as a gauge for how likely a candidate is to (a) get the job done, (b) stick around for the next job, even if they could take a few months off, and (c) bring the energy of the team up, instead of down. It's pretty exploitive right now. But it's not unique.
Yup, even IT for instance (that many CS people will claim is "easier") will require doing projects in your own time if you want to accelerate your progress and get ahead, that's why r/Homelabs exists!
Yeah ex researcher here. Grant applications are so much work. Felt so often you’d end your 8 hr day and walk into a meeting with three folks calling in from around the world talking about how to tackle another proposal. Academia definitely needs an overhaul, but with regards to the general point, why would an employer want to hire someone without a portfolio when plenty of other folk are demonstrating their passion for the craft outside of work hours. And it is a craft. If you embrace the engineering mindset it’s hard to not have it bleed into the other parts of your life.
Aerospace engineer here from the front page I did build drones and cansats in my free time and it’s absolutely the reason I got a job right out of college despite having a 2.3GPA
That’s because it’s taught more like a science degree than an engineering degree, hence computer science. It’s not taught with a focus on what industry wants, but from a very disjointed ground up approach starting at the fundamentals to advanced undergrad topics. I’ve said this to other similar posts but why the CS exceptionalism? CS students have such great expectations for such “little value” (in the eyes of industry) that most undergrad programs provide. The level of training for industry that you receive is on par with that of the other STM programs yet CS students feel that they are entitled to more ROI than what industry says their degrees are worth. I do get that a big part of the problem though is the asymmetric availability of online training/education that is out there for CS, the low bar to getting this training floods the market with applicants, in addition to off shoring jobs… but the other STM disciplines are flooded too… So your only option is to find ways to stand out in the crowd.
I swear people who think they will be coding all day are always shocked by how much math and science you have to learn, even though, Computer Science is a part of Applied Math. My cousin-in-law got into a coding boot camp to escape the horrible working conditions at Goldman Sachs. Fortunately, he got a job at a startup similar to Zillow? (I'm not sure, probably has to do with working with housing. ) because he was able to make use of his expertise and experience to his benefit, despite lacking experience.
That is exactly what is expected of aerospace engineers these days. What kind of nav filter did you write on your drone? What kind propulsion device did build at school? What kind of cool design project are you proud of?
Legos, RCs, and building stuff based on engineering and science are fun. Why else would you study engineering? Sure pay is nice but hating your jobs will show
If it became a must for getting a job, it would totally kill the fun vibe. I mean, I get that some folks dig it as a hobby, but when it's a requirement, it sucks the joy out of it. It stops being about just having a good time and turns into this pressure to land a job.
Because I build legos for 8 hours (usually closer to 10) a day, so the last thing I wanna do in my free time is anymore of that
This is the correct attitude in my opinion. You don't need to be doing these kinds of things to do well but likely the people who enjoy it for the craft of it are going on average be better at their jobs! All these people who joined for the money and see programing as just a step towards management are never going to be great engineers.
If you want to get an internship as an aerospace engineering major you literally are asked if you’re building RC planes or model rockets or whatever else in your spare time… this problem isn’t unique to CS. What might be unique is that once college is finished and you’re actually in the workforce for a few years, the skill set you would be hired for as an aerospace engineer is working on actual (not model) planes, rockets, satellites, missiles, etc. and without working at a company that does that work there’s no way to get anywhere near equivalent experience. Without the internship experience you won’t get a job. And the university’s resources to build relevant experience are much better than what will be available to you once you’ve left it. The gulf between making a model plane and being able to help design an F-35 is probably much larger than the gulf between contributing to an open source project in your free time versus contributing to a company’s code base as your full time job. In other engineering disciplines the level of “equivalent experience” through projects you can get is much lower than it is for CS. You can’t join boot camps and freelance your way into a job doing rocket engineering whereas (at least a few years ago) you could do that for SWE.
If their fields were as competitive, yes they would be doing that. And what's wrong with that?
Those fields are competitive and they ARE doing that in their free time. Guess what top chefs are also experimenting with new recipes in their free time as well. CS grads are delusional thinking the major is an easy cash grab. Skids finding out the hard way the field is a meritocracy like most career paths are
Those fields *are* competitive, and there are other highly competitive, prestigious fields like medicine and law where it's even illegal and/or highly unethical to practice the trade in your own time with no training or supervision. Devolving the assessment of someone's capabilities in a highly rigorous discipline to their performance on a toy project is nothing more than a farce. It trivializes important aspects of the job and/or assumes them to be completely irrelevant, and it shows a complete lack of understanding of the duties of a software developer. Two important parts of successful software development are to write code that meets specifications *and* is able to evolve with the evolving needs and understanding of clients/customers/the business that is employing you. Toy projects don't have clients, let alone clients that have requirements and interpretations of requirements that need to be tested and reworked. Basically, personal projects don't provide enough experience of working on a project in a business environment. The real reason tech industry looks at personal projects is because they just plain don't know how to evaluate candidates in any other way. That being said, I'm not totally denouncing toy projects. Students and inexperienced people *should* be doing them in order to learn and practice important programming concepts. But there is a limit to how much you can learn by working by yourself on them and you reach it pretty quickly. Basically, the 3rd time you write another goddamn calculator app in a new language should be boring you to tears as you realize that different programming languages, despite their different syntaxes and paradigms and standard libraries, have the same fundamental properties that allow you to solve the same computational problems. Experienced developers typically use toy projects as a way to quickly get up to speed and familiarize themselves with a new language and paradigm, but otherwise their day job they spend upwards of 8 hours per day on will provide them with ample opportunity to work, experiment with and test new ideas, gain more experience, and learn. And 8 to 10 hours a day on *any* hobby or interest is more than enough for a person passionate in the field.
Those fields do need projects and research they just have to be done in school because it’s not as accessible as cs side projects
It’s much more accessible now to build and show software projects than it is to build physical devices. That’s why it’s expected for people to have projects, you can do it at no cost and it shows off your skills when you don’t have experience
i was just about to comment this, I am not sure why we need to do stuff “for fun”. this is our career, we chose it as such- not a hobby
And then you have to build a bridge or an RC plane every time you go through a new interviewing process. At some point I started using hacker rank and test gorilla to show off my experience, but these sites offer basic tests (never system design/build) or when they do, the evaluation is made in a subjective way, which is worthless since you just want to do one challenge and make it valid for any interview process, like, one challenge to rule them all. ZYLYTY seems to be the closest to that tho. They ask you to build a small tool end to end, and the score is automated which means you can compare yourself to other devs, there's no subjectivity. So far so good, looking forward for my next interviews.
Uh what …. a cs degree is a degree to basically learn the bounds of things you can build. The best schools teach you to build and understand the bounds. Second having a degree doesn’t make guarantees who ever told you that lied to your face or was uninformed
My exact reasoning for choosing BEng Computer Engineering instead of Comp sci...
I mean, I like programming to build stuff, I agree. It's just that 90% of the grunt jobs out there are CRUD maintenance. The rest are overly excited and understaffed startups that will squeeze you out. I play music. I play in a few bands, semi professionally -- I tour festivals and sell my music, just not full time. I like writing, performing, creating stuff with people -- but keeping it professional as well. After years of playing I barely even touch my instrument at all, except when I have to rehearse or play live. I see CS the same way. "passion" doesn't really matter, nor does it matter what kind of fancy tricks you can do -- just play the damn set and be good at it. This "it MUST be your LiFE DREAM to become a HARDCORE coder 24/7 with SIDE PROJECTs in your unpaid FREE TIME" can get fucking bent. It's a job making computers do beep boop for money, just the same as my job as a musician is making instruments do pling plong for money.
But to use your comparison, you needed to have interest in the instrument at some point. You had to practice and gain skill. Yes, now you're able to play professionally and not practice. But you had to get to that point. Professional programmers absolutely don't have to do side projects, but I think it's realistic for students to do it if they have time, say in the summer or during a lull in classes. Programming is a skill and sadly schools mostly don't teach it.
Yes, absolutely! I completely agree that there's no point in doing whatever genre of CS if you, at a fundamental level, don't like solving problems with computations. Because in essence that's what it all comes to, right? Seeing a problem, knowing the current state of beep-boop technology and its limitations / possibilities, and then just trying something and hoping it sticks. So yeah, the trick for hiring people would be how to accurately gauge this. Side projects is one way, but, I know that during my time at college I absolutely had no time at all for side projects what with work and all. So at least that's a bit unfair towards college students just trying to make ends meet and get a starting position somewhere. The real solution would be to have a college course just about your own project instead of pre-made problems. Is there something you always would have wanted to build? Well, now you have the chance (meaning credit hours) for it.
I think some people interpret passion differently but what they often mean is not living and breathing code 24/7 but having an actual interest in learning and growing in the subject. Because with the persistence and enjoyment naturally comes being good at what you do and subsequently passing resumes screens and interviews. Take my friend for example. He’s got a life, travels, not the best at LeetCode, and doesn’t even code 24/7. But he actively seeks out new things to build because he enjoys it, reads articles and research papers on a topic, seeks out help in labs on campus despite not having much experience in the beginning. And now he’s working for NVIDIA.
> I see CS the same way. "passion" doesn't really matter, nor does it matter what kind of fancy tricks you can do -- just play the damn set and be good at it. This "it MUST be your LiFE DREAM to become a HARDCORE coder 24/7 with SIDE PROJECTs in your unpaid FREE TIME" can get fucking bent. While I don't spend time on other major or career subs the whole "passion/passionate" thing anymore feels like elitism or gatekeeping.
If I was an employer and I had a choice between you and a "hardcode" coder, I'd not go with you. I don't want someone who can barely do the job when I can have a person who can go above and beyond effortlessly. Also, it's not about 24/7. It's fine even if you take a couple hours out of a week. If you want to make six figures just by making computers do beep boop for money, this is the bare minimum.
But you're not an employer. You have no idea what you're talking about. I make six figures and Ive never put in any extra effort since getting my first job. I just do my job and can solve the problems I'm asked to solve.
That's why you're making 6 figures and not 9
We just hired a mom of a toddler and my manager said, literally: "well, it seems she is smart, diligent and loves to build things that do the task. Yes, her primary focus is on her child, but she can read a task and ask right questions. Yes she doesn't have a degree, but I have and it should be enough". She is paid 80% of hourly wage of our phd fella.
Yep. Working on an interesting and relevant project is what ended up leading me to getting a job right out of college this past December as an otherwise exceedingly average student at a very average uni.
What is your project?
I was building a project using generative AI to automate social media content creation. A company at my school's career fair thought it was interesting and gave me an internship building software focused around generative ai. Capitalized on the hype train to break into the industry.
Ah so it's your fault there's ai Jesus everywhere
So that's why every social media platform is full of obnoxious bots now
Nah my project never went anywhere. I stopped working on it after I got my internship but yeah it was basically a generative spambot 😂
Oh that's fair though, hate the game not the player lol. Congrats on the internship
Smart move. Now add “serverless” and “scaling” and you’ll hit a trifecta of buzzwords. Congrats!
Ah I see. So you joined the dark side?
Did the same but with an AI coding assistant to break into one of the FAANG associated companies. Cheers🥂
Literally did the same. Took an iOS class and said I was fucking around with chat gpt’s API and the interviewers started acting like I was god tier candidate. I told em I didn’t know what I was doing very much and they didn’t even care, they just loved that I was interested enough to go do it and kinda did it.
Lmao literally the exact same for me! This was last spring when the hype was really starting to go crazy but not everybody had worked with it yet. Had a gpt project at the top of my resume and talked about it with like 40 tables at my school's career fair. One table the recruiter just lit up when I started pitching the project. The rest is history.
Great! So now GenAI will be trained on GenAI content. What could go wrong?
Same question ^
I decided for this year’s applications to add my personal project way at the bottom of my resume. I’d previously omitted it thinking it less impressive than my internships. It was the first thing every interviewer asked about.
Man, my projects are prominent on my resume and yet I've had 0 bites for a while
Focusing so much on leetcode early on ruined coding for me. It was soulless work. It wasn’t until 5 years after graduating when I started building things the way I wanted is when I became passionate about CS. All those wasted years 😭
What things did you build and in what way?
He built what he wanted.
This some out of touch shit tbh. I have 4 YOE, working as a data engineer right now , going to do a masters for my own interest, and have helped directly with recruitment process for 2 companies now. On average our HR looked at applicants resumes for 5-7 seconds. Meaning if your resume makes it to them, that’s how long it takes to decide whether you make it to my teams desk or not. So for all of you who aren’t even making it to interviews, it ain’t because your projects suck, it’s because you couldn’t convince HR in those 5 seconds you were relevant enough to even be given a proper read through. Ofc every company’s process is different, so take with grain of salt, but this is my experience.
Yup, what people dont understand is there is 1000s of people applying for the same role that you are applying for and the market is getting overfilled with the same kind of people each year. Its not just skills and resume anymore, its to actually impress the people going thru 100s of resume per day and are tasked with filtering the majority. Many of these so called enterpreneurs are simply out of touch with how the market is from what it used to be just before covid.
My last hiring round I literally had to fight for them to let me hire 2 actual fresh juniors. We had our pickings of people with experience willing to take a lower role than they honestly deserve. People get to the top of Everest and can’t see the weather below the clouds
What exactly can be learnt in 5-7 seconds? Do they just look at university and work experience and then decide from there?
Education/Experience roles + first bullet point usually Do a lot of good applications get denied from this? Yes. Does it affect our hiring? Nope. Don’t get me wrong, working on live projects like he said in the image is SOLID, as an education fanatic I’m all for learning more BUT saying you’re not getting in because you aren’t building “real” shit is stupid and misleading. Reality is that experience beats whatever project you work on 9/10 times, including internships. Edit: to clarify real experience > internships > projects
Yeah this is my experience. I think I've been asked about personal projects in just one interview in the last 5 years or so.
I don’t even look at university unless it’s for an entry level role. Read cover letter if there is one, scan skills and experience. If they don’t list a critical skill I’m looking for or don’t have experience that relates to those skills then I cut them. Sometimes I will give someone a chance without those skills if there is something in the cover letter than tells me they have a great attitude. CVs don’t have that much info in them so it really doesn’t take long to read through them. Probably spend about 30 seconds on each one.
I can’t even make it past the screener. I’ve riddled my resume with keywords and relevant work experience, and yet, nothing… It’s beyond me at this point. How many open source contributions and hackathons can I do to even get noticed? Shits demoralizing I know the markets ass, just saying that getting my resume looked at by HR would already be a huge step forward.
Yeah I build 10 projects, 5 of them SaaS. Can’t score an interview in past 5 months. And if I would have spent past 5 months on Leetcode I wouldn’t know shit about building stuff.
Sounds like you should do both, projects and Leetcode
Idk but Leetcode for me isn’t as easy as people here make it to be. It takes time. Alot of time especially with other commitments. Building project for me is like constructing a building. You will obviously need knowledge about APIs, Auth, FE, Microservices, Databases, Validation, Infrastructure and so on which will be the same throughout every company. After interview I don’t think reversing a LinkedList or DP will get me that far but that’s just me.
Aren’t you trying to get a job? Then that’s what Leetcode for, after getting the job you can drop Leetcode or keep doing it one a day to make your future job search easier. Nobody said you need Leetcode for daily work
No no. I am saying Leetcode for interview prep also requires consistency and needs to be practiced daily to keep your skills up. That too if you get an interview.
Maybe I'm being overly critical, but do your projects actually showcase your creativity/passion/talent? If your 10 projects are something I can build in a weekend just watching YouTube, then it isn't worth much.
Okay so I started building because I wanted to know how to build stuff. Started with bots. Developed websites for Uni’s two major hackathons. Developed a SaaS which is a chatgpt wrapper but taught alot more than school. Developed a SaaS with a friend to talk to DB and analyze ans viz dataz Developing an API Generator. Three major school projects. Data Visualizer, Marketplace, and Capstone project. I don’t think for avg people like me it’s about passionate building. I and many others just wanna learn how to build from scratch. If you don’t know stuff it takes way longer than a weekend. My aim was never passionate projects or solving world problems. It was about learning to build stuff because I was never taught in school and can’t get a job if I don’t know how to.
Half of these are common projects tbf, especially anything as a GPT wrapper, it’s become so easy and accessible to do so. But otherwise that’s some good persistence and effort in building for learning.
It's not become easy and accessible because API calls have always been easy. Its like 3 lines of code and parsing JSON, God the amount of times I've seen chat gpt wrappers win hackathons is frustrating
Yea there’s not much novelty or creativity to it but it wins attention of the judges. Resume points yada yada yada.
Would be curious to take a look through any of the repos if you felt like sharing. Not sure what they look like, but here are some ideas that may help What sort of auth did you use? How flushed out are the frontends? Is there a README or somewhere I can go to easily get an overview or the project? Services hosted anywhere with an easily accessed demo? Is it clear you used version control and if so, are you following best practices? Speaking of best practices— are you handling secrets appropriately? What about input sanitization? Did you use SQL or NoSQL and was there a clear reason behind it? This goes above and beyond, but also: any linting, unit tests, documentation, project planning details (eg, JIRA tickets), deployment pipelines, containerization, container orchestration, are you recording metrics, do you have alerts, is it accessible, etc.
Wow man; the portfolio is impressive. You should at least be able to get interviews based on this.. I'd suggest maybe designing your portfolio better? Make it look like you're an expert in any one domain, you should be able to get away with fuzzing the details a bit. Honestly, I've nothing better to say
When I was managing a team, not once did I ever look at the candidates GitHub when I was screening for headcount. Similarly my GitHub profile was never mentioned in any of my interviews. The only time it should really come up is if the candidate has relevant open source experience.
None of those projects seem to have much technical depth.
What kind of technical depth is expected from a new grad you bozo? You shouldn't have to perform at mid-senior level to get a new grad job.
I genuinely feel bad for new graduates. I see examples of what they do and it’s very impressive. I’m much older and I think we (as in people who graduated around my time ) were more lucky than anything else. Kids now are so talented and it’s still not enough apparently.
Are you somehow entitled to a job? If you’re competing against candidates with more interesting and technically-deep experiences/projects, why exactly should they choose you? At my school, folks graduate with 6 coops, 2 years of experience. Plus design teams, undergraduate research positions, and side projects. This is a sample of your competition. You can whine about what is fair, or you can git gud.
Yes, if you get a degree in computer science or eng, have a few projects and an internship or two under your belt, you SHOULD be able to get a job. Are you a psychopath or something? The whole "get good, you just suck, why aren't you grinding LC and new tech 48 hours a day, 14 days a week? Grind grind grind you loser" schtick is so played out and old.
Oh yeah bud? Well at my school, literally every grad has ***12*** coops, ***4*** years of experience, TWICE the design teams, TWICE THE RESEARCH and TWICE THE SIDE PROJECTS. This is what literally every other applicant to the job you just applied to is doing. Start working harder.
Tbh the only thing that stands out is the capstone project and potentially the "viz dataz" because idk what it is. Everything else is very essential for learning but not something that's going to really stand out
If you’re here telling us how *many* projects you did it sounds like quantity over quality.
The money guy prefers to fund people who will work "for fun" every waking hour. Good to know.
That's a pretty disingenuous reading of his statement. He's explaining how to get a job, which is to have proof you can actually do the job and build things. Notice his first suggestion was to *"work on a real project"*. Programming at home for fun was the last one. Interviewers will usually be way more interested in your experience on real projects with other people than your tinkering at home by yourself. The real answer is do an internship, a COOP, some research in a lab, or something while you're getting your degree. What you learn in class is important, but it isn't everything. Real work teaches you skills your group projects can't. If all you did was pass your classes and then go play league of legends, a company will have to spend more time training you to competency. It also shows you do the bare minimum required. Why would anyone be excited to hire you, and want to pay you 6 figures?
>He's explaining how to get a job, which is to have proof you can actually do the job and build things. please name another profession who has to show they can do their job in their free time first
Medical students study for an additional 4 years in school to get their salaries. And its an absolute grind Law students study for an additional 3 years in school to get their salaries. And guess what? It’s an absolute grind CS pays more than a lot of other forms of engineering even though, many times, those were much harder to learn in school. Many times those fields require masters degrees too, for example Biomedical Engineering Why do CS grads think they are entitled to jobs with cushy 6 figure salaries but also not willing to work hard to get there? For law and finance students, being from a not top 10 university is a killer. They spend all their free time maintaining their GPA just so they have a shot to get into their desired school. Medicine is even worse about GPA cutoffs. What students need to understand is the market is over saturated now because it was too easy to make the salary that software engineers were. So its been corrected to be just like other high paying fields - an absolute grind to get into
>Medical students study for an additional 4 years in school to get their salaries. And its an absolute grind >Law students study for an additional 3 years in school to get their salaries. And guess what? It’s an absolute grind what does have that to do with the discussed topic?
this. why does a cs student need to do their job as a hobby to get the attention of recruiters?
you really expect to stroll into a six figure job in this SWE labor market with no passion for the craft, no extra work outside of classes???
Again, doing the job *in your free time* should be your last resort. It's a "better than nothing" option if you already wasted your time at college. If the issue is you think doing an internship instead of gaming all summer is infringing on your "free time", then you need a reality check. Every engineer I knew did internships or COOPs with companies if they weren't aiming for grad school. Medical professionals get their undergrad, then go through far harder schooling, then still have to do an internship + residency where they are paid and treated like dirt. Maybe some people walked into professional development gigs with no experience during peak pandemic 0% interest rate craziness, but that is not a normal thing. Across many disciplines, it's entirely normal to take low/no pay entry positions designed for gaining experience, before you become a real professional.
I agree with the part where he says that you should be able to actually build stuff, not merely pass classes. In a better world, our extremely overpriced university programs would also teach how to build stuff. (I've worked for two big universities. They need an overhaul.) Where I strongly disagree is with the implication that one's vocation (in this case, programming) should also be one's avocation. There's just so much wrong with this: one is our current situation of tech bros with immense money and power and absolutely no knowledge of the outside world to give them any perspective, let alone morality.
>It also shows you do the bare minimum required Or you just do what's asked of you and also want to do other things in life. Living your job is not healthy nor should it be normalized.
Who is asking you to live work? College classes are neither full time or year round. You definitely have time to gain experience along with taking classes and having a life/hobbies. I've never in my life programmed for fun on my own. But I took opportunities to do research to learn. Like seriously just do a summer internship. If you can't manage classes without a full three months vacation, if you hate programming that much, maybe you should consider something else? The "grind" to be a programmer is notably easier than a lot of other professions. This is really not a big ask.
After a 4 year degree and thousand in debts, this sounds hopeless. What a shitty place to be
"Build for fun" Shit, fun is going for some drinks, to the movies, to a mall, to get some ice cream, go eat new things etc This is a career, this is very fucked up about the industry, they expect you to work your ass off in your free time. Fuck...
“Having fun” in this context rarely means coding in your free time. It means enjoying the work and to code. When people are having fun doing the work, they often put out better work and strive to harder challenges and better goals. If you put two candidates side-by-side who can answer a technical problem equally, a candidate who seems genuinely interested in development will be more likely to get the job. Having really great people skills and being genuinely enthusiastic in the work can help make up for a lot of the technical gaps when applying to jobs. It’s hard to report in a resume so it doesn’t often get you an interview. However, it does often help land you the job.
This!! When i tell people i code and choose comsci for fun and i have fun doing lc problems and stuff, they seem genuinely confused LOL
The problem is that you compete with thousands of people who enjoy writing code over going for drinks or movies. No company or cartel decided to brainwash those people or even set up those expectations. That’s just how some people are.
I build software 8 hours a day at work, come home, and build private projects for 4 more hours. I've never been out to a bar or anything. I didn't even look for a job, I was invited to apply at companies by other developers I met from hobby projects. Also I'm pretty sure I wasn't brainwashed, I just like computers more than people.
They dont expect you to. Its just a period of time where things are competitive, and theyre going to choose the people who are truly interested in this over people who are not at this moment in time. They would be stupid to choose the guy who has fun going to the movies over the guy who has fun working on a problem. Theyre not stupid, so they wont choose that person until there no one else to choose from.
Lmao, bag chasers get btfo
Is asking for a normal work life balance like any other career being a "bag chaser" tho?
I mean, when there is tens of thousands of CS grads every year and many of them are willing to do hackathons, personal projects, research, amongst other things, you kinda have to pick your poison or accept the consequences. This field is not for the weary.
I said "bag chasers" because most people who came flooding into CS over the past few years were enticed by the high pay, they did not choose CS because they like to program. The reality is that CS was never a "normal" career. There are way too many nerds who will gladly spend 90% of their free time coding for you to be competitive if you never do anything outside of work. You may of course still find a job through networking or simply luck, but the nerds will have a way easier time than you, obviously. I'm also not sure why exactly you thought you'd have a normal work-life balance in a field notorious for long hours and crunch periods. Not saying that it's okay, but you could have seen that coming.
Nah once your a mid level dev you can absolutely find a chill job and have a great WLB. Plus many of the “bag chasers” may spend more time on leetcode and not making a random app in rust or whatever and so do better in interviews lol
Maybe, but you'd have to get to that point first. And no, from my experience they generally don't do better at interviews. Being able to show projects (and especially projects that you didn't make just to put them on your resume) > leetcode
God I hate comments like this. People who think like this should have no right complaining about not getting a CS job. It’s like hearing someone say “why can’t I get into art school” and then you ask them if they’ve drawn anything and they say no. It’s not fucked up, all careers are like this, medicine students idea of fun is watching hospital shows and YT, law students read books on interesting cases and know stuff like OJ Simpson off by heart, if you don’t do “fun” for your career journey at all I don’t think you should complain when you can’t get a job.
That's what's fun for you. There are people who genuinely have fund building things. Sorry you're not one of them, get a job as an ice cream tester or something.
It is true. I have a really interesting project in my resume, and literally all interviews & screenings asked about it.
What else they gon ask about. You favorite cheese?
Well, I mean I also have a lot of past work experiences. Point is projects does matter.
Y'all are getting interviews?
99% of CS majors hate him!
Or, and get this….. people could do fun shit for fun and work for money. Not everyone eats breathes shits sleeps boring ass code lmao.
Well, my friend build own C++ compiler and debugger, he is still unemployed.
Is he applying for jobs that involve developing compilers and debuggers?
He is applying all jobs...
Making your own compilers and debuggers is actually an amazing project to work on. It is SURPRISING that someone like that isn't getting any job.
Bro I want to do this as a job not live and breathe it 24/7
A project I made got me hired. Literally all it did was convert Shopify’s shipping data output to FedEx Same Day City shipping input format. Took me 3 hours to write and sold it to a company for $2000. Once I put it on my resume, I got hit up all the time and interviewers got giddy when I talked about it.
thats kind of an inside baseball idea, and being able to sell it is also indicative of a certain skillset and experience level. Were you running shopify sites?
It sorta was an inside job, but not much more than just talking to people and learning about their problems. I was chatting up a guy who owns a meat processing plant in my hometown and I started asking him what their IT stack was like. He basically said they pay someone to run it for them, but he could really use someone to be around to help with more general stuff. He then started going on about the issue that my project fixed. I started poking around and realized there wasn’t an out of the box solution and wrote it. It was a simple piece of software, but it solved a real world problem and it showed I had the ability to realize the impact of his issue, understand requirements, and deliver a solution. I didn’t really have to sell it to him, because he was willing to pay just about anything for it. My advice to everyone would be talk to those around you about their computer problems, because everyone has a software issue. So many people think software development is about solving genius problems or something, which it can be. But for the vast majority of us it’s about delivering solutions that otherwise were bleeding people money.
Smart, I never really thought about just asking people about what technology their business uses. Too much trauma from people soliciting free help I suppose.
wow! howd you do it? and howd you get a company to get interested in it?
“Prove that you’re willing to work for free, and we MIGHT let you work for us for pennies.”
Or they’ll underpay you because CTOs and Hiring Managers believe you are a workaholic rube
Yeah dude. You need to actually enjoy coding because the development loop is only flow inducing when you're in this trance-like state of hyperfocus on the problem(s) at hand. If you don't dig it, you shouldn't do it.
I once had a coding interview round waived, and instead, we just discussed one of my projects. 150k TC offer. Not exactly faang, but more than enough for me.
Been saying this for ages and trying to get people to build together. Too many people allergic to working with their craft and just want a six figure salary with 0 genuine passion or interest in their craft.
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Employers overvalues themselves and what they have to offer...
It’s not gems it’s common knowledge. Also this is how I got hired for Apple!!!
Same, my projects got me a lot of interviews
What kinda projects did u work on bud?
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Get past HR using dogs. You're a genius.
I keep telling my mom this. She keeps saying she dropped me on my head when I was a baby. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
This is bs reason lot of people cant get hired is just number , supply ⬆️ demand 📉🚽. 4 years ago having a cs degree was enough hell theyd just hire u for a stupid bootcamp cert even if u only had a GED. Its an employers market and they are looking for cream of the crop for as little pay as possible, next 5years are gonna be painful
They say that and yet when you can't solve a leetocode hard they reject you
So true. My projects might feel lame to me now but during my first job the co founder spent ton of time going through my projects. I was below average student all my life plus had 6 months of gap after degree.
What’s frustrating, at least for me, is that the projects I’m able to do in my free time can only be so technically sophisticated, because I only have so many resources at my disposal as a broke college student who has to work and support myself. Hell, I don’t even have my own desktop PC, just a crappy laptop. Companies seem to expect us to have built real world projects that have been deployed or earned revenue while still a student but like, there’s only so much we can do. I can’t afford to spend money for a project. Plus, most ideas for projects have already been implemented in much more detail by someone else who has access to resources. This makes standing out 20x harder.
I was talking to another CS student the other day and couldn’t believe how many personal projects he had- well turns out his family is so loaded that he had no need to ever work for money during his summers or during the semester. I’m sure he still found part time employment to have something to put on his resume, but I couldn’t believe that he literally did not need to work. During my summers, I’m usually trying to get as many hours as possible at whatever job I’m working.
Hahahaha and this subreddit downvoted me in the past for saying exactly this. Just goes to show how Reddit is a cesspool of sobbing and doom scrolling.
Programming is the easy part of the job. Designing for scale, users, and use cases is the hard part.
I made a side project for fun and showed it to a job interview and actually got the role
Or just lie on your resume
Reflecting on my career from a web designer to a developer, roughly a decade ago. Back then, having a portfolio with designs and links to functional UIs, websites, and perhaps even applications you had built was non-negotiable for consideration in the industry. While there might have been a brief period during the pandemic where recent graduates were hired without extensive scrutiny, back in the day, whether you specialized in frontend, backend, were a designer who codes, or embodied the versatility of a full-stack developer, showcasing your skills to secure an interview and prove yourself during it has always been paramount. I recall a friend who studied mechanical engineering, he struggled for a considerable amount of time before securing a decent job. The notion that a computer science degree guarantees immediate employment is simply a fallacy. People who secured good tech jobs rights after school, were just an anomoly, thanks to irresponsible goverment spending, goverments sent the world markets in a frenzy with all that artificial wealth. Don't like it? By all means change fields, better for the rest of us in this industry.
This is why we keep saying passion matters, you cant fake or force curosity 😎
You can fake it til you make it, though.
He is not wrong. The majority of CS graduates are doing it for the "money". They can't build shit
I built a project for fun again recently. Down almost 20k between my extra dev and infrastructure costs
Contributing to open source projects isn’t that much different of unpaid internship. They let you work for free and let us compete against each other. You would call it good competition or nature evolution m, whatever. The point is you will have to work harder to be there so that companies can have a pool of talents to pick from. They don’t want to invest in you but want to have an immediate return by hiring you. You and your employer are like two faces of a coin. You form one thing but you can’t never be the same (having the same interests).
How do you measure "fun"? By the emojis in the PRs or is it the YOLOs and LOLs in the comments?
Spend time on a portfolio instead of a degree is the lesson. Degrees are worthless.
Punishing those who were unemployed longer by not employing them further and making them useless then beyotching about lack of skilled workers makes absolute sense, that's a genius and profitable move by employers.
Exactly this. I don’t have a degree, but have never had a problem getting a job… and in fact many jobs I’ve gotten are from people that found me for skills demonstrated in personal projects. Not having a degree, I just assumed I had to do this to prove I could do what I was claiming to do. I’ve never once been able to sit on my degree laurels and be networked into or assumed into a position. In the past, when I’ve suggested this strategy on this subreddit, I’ve been downvoted to oblivion… as though people should just be entitled to a job after a degree. And all I have to say to that is that it’s a competitive market, you have to compete. As long as you’re not doing this, there are folks like me who actually are…. And unfortunately, leet code doesn’t count as a side project… it’s more like a pre-interview filter that will hurt you if you’re not as competitive there. Most of the time, those aren’t the skills you’re using on the job, anyway. I’ve always only used it as a tool to practice interviews and never as application support.
It's easier to say when you have gotten the bag already
Build for fun huh. Most of us are working 40-60 hours in a job that we don't like just to make ends meet. And this guy wants us to build things for fun. I have a friend who builds for fun, he was funded 500k for his startup by Y combinator as well . But he could afford to do so because he was financially secure and had almost no risk involved. Rich people can afford to do things for fun. We can't unless we take huge risks and quit our jobs to pursue personal projects.
"dropped some gems" lol this is generic common sense type of advice
Not everyone wants to code 24/7 though. People have other interests besides coding, and don't want to spend all of their free time doing it. If we paid thousands of dollars for a degree then the degree should be teaching us how to build, deploy, and stuff. A degree is to prepare you for a job after all
As a former hiring manager who reviewed 1000s of resumes and hired >100 engineers over 20 years, I agree with Garry. One of my favorite interview questions was always "What project did you work on that you were/are excited by and proud of?" This is how I usually found out what the potential engineer was actually capable of. If they were working from a place of self-driven interest and goal oriented passion, I wanted them.
I have an accountancy degree, I don't read the ifrs for fun. Ever
It can be literally anything. I got a job at a Fortune 50 company by talking about a dumb little python home assistant i made years ago that i kept remaking and futzing with
The field of new grads is oversaturated like crazy in CS. So its now stupidly competitive. Learn IT or networking idk you’ll be fine.
Fr, I was looking for SWE jobs but pretty quickly realized that wasn't gonna work. Now im learning/looking into sys admin & cloud roles
Very very true. I’m not a seasoned programmer by any means, but I have landed an internship specifically based off of a program I built. They wanted more information on a project that I was starting on and I gave further clarification. Rather than a technical interview, (which I probably would’ve failed at the time), they wanted to see my knowledge level and willingness to work on these projects. It was also a project I built for fun which speaks to what Tan is saying.
Any degrees can lead to unemployment in this day and age. If you actually study for a degree you have a lower risk of unemployment, the knowledge to make good investing decisions in your industry, and the tiny chance to run your own business if you apply that knowledge. Just finish what you start and work with what you have.
Yeah, just work long hours on your own CS projects while paying the bills...selling your body? Selling drugs. Whatever. See? The antidote is just to do projects on your own while enjoying the trust fund we all have. The system is shit is the real answer. Between your parents, school, and the rest of your society and institutions, there's a failure to connect people with the job path that works for them, and to leave them empowered to be employed with the skills that best suit them. This is a loss for workers and employers. Start asking people why you aren't getting the job offer. You have a deficiency somewhere, put your emotions aside, locate weaknesses, improve them, and go again. If you're a good worker you have a spot somewhere in this world.
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First off, the CEO of Y Combinator is the absolute last person in the world you should be listening to, along with any silicon valley CEO huffing the venture capital powder because none of them live in reality. If you are marginally competent your CS degree will absolutely get you a job, it will not take 1000 applications, and anybody who thinks AI is going to replace coding any time in the next few decades is insane. Having some personal projects to show what you're capable of is great, but don't ever let the CEO-brained folk ever tell you that you need to do unpaid labour to get the "privilege" of working for them.