CS Students: Proving Their Expertise

“This statement learn does not mean anything without a goal. Also it is such a catch 22. For example you are mid 40s backend ic. If I say learn. Without a goal of job switching the learning is useless. Also the search a Job has become a full time job. And the expectation for same salary is sky high.”

“ah... not true... you can reduce the scope and learn the fundamentals at home. I have CS bachelor's and master's degree, and an electrical engineering bachelor's. I've successfully developed 3 IoT products that're doing very well, it all started with 3d printers , PCBWay and ESP32s. Did it help having learned the fundamentals of electronics? Sure, would I be able to do it without college? No doubt. How would I do it today? Learn the basics at home and outsource!! Outsource th”

“Been in school for a little while and I’m a littler over halfway done. I’m currently sr level support / JR system admin in my career, but want to move into full systems admin and then cloud soon. I started a new job about a month ago and my manager told me that they will pay for any cert exams I take as long as they're IT related. However, they will not offer tuition reimbursement for my degree program. I’m really tempted to drop school and just get the certs I want. The question is, in this”

“I felt the same starting out. working with .NET and Delphi stuff which college did prepare me for lol but I also did go to college for Computer Engineering not Software Engineering. The first thing you have to know is that school does not translate to the workplace well. I was average in college but I have been praised since I got here at my company and have seen straight A students struggling. Second is set your expectations to be realistic. Do not expect to be the guy for a while. You are a ju”

“Hi, so I'm writing this post because I have a hard time choosing the next path in my career. Currently I work as a network equipment tester and I feel like I've hit a ceiling and there's not much more to learn here and the pay isn't the best. I've been working at this company for over a year and I think it's time to go forward but I don't know what to do. I know a bit of python where I made some simple games, networking, linux and javscript where I made a lot of websi”

“Ok so i wanna apply for cs but god damn it the anxiety i developed on the last 2 years and since ai became a thing is unbearable. I'm from a third-world country and i'm religious so i always try to calm myself saying that oh my country still have a long way to go in the tech field of course there will be plenty of jobs, and yeah job is a blessing from god and as long as i have faith and pray to god god will grant me it and of course if i workd hard enough i'll harvest the fruits of m”

“Just curious because I’m trying to explore options outside of SWE. I’m interested in hearing from people with tech-adjacent roles too.🙂 submitted by /u/Huge_Librarian_9883 [link] [comments]”

“Hi all, I pivoted to DE 3 years ago as a junior and moved to a new DE role at a consultancy. I've had essentially no onboarding which I guess is somewhat normal as I've not been staffed on any project yet. I was told to prep for certifications since they help sell to clients and I picked Fabric because I've had no exposure to it before. 3 days ago I was told I'll help as the sole DE on a Fabric IQ project which is mostly about workspace/roles configuration, reviewing semantic mod”

“I’m seeing both real life and online discussions where a significant number of engineers seem to be outsourcing their thinking to the models. My experience has been that if I am closely critiquing agent outputs and thinking through what they are doing, I’ll steer it better, have a more fruitful discussion and better overall outcomes. With everyone having access to the same level of intelligence and with most coding and some knowledge work abstracted out to agents, how are you keeping yourself sh”

“Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. I tried r/csMajors , but it got removed thanks to their rule on personal projects. In a month, I’ll be a CS sophomore at a state school. I’ve been slacking hard on doing stuff outside of class, but I’ve recently been trying to do better about that. I’ve recently come up with the idea to do a personal project surrounding one of my favorite gaming franchises, Call of Duty Zombies. I’m making a Blazor web app in C# (that’s a big language my school uses”

“So, I’m an aspiring homesteader (college student, going into cybersecurity). I also just don’t really envision myself as ever having kids. I’ve heard that STEM jobs are pretty common for those who are self-paid with homesteading, and I know that many homesteaders don’t have kids. However, when I see a lot of things online about how to homestead with a full time job, it usually boils down to “have the kids do the chores while you’re at work”. Obviously working remotely would be ideal, but I know”

“I kind of hate what my resume looks like these days. The last 4 years have been: - 2022-2023: Big tech, swept up in mass layoff - 2023-2024: iCasino company, change of leadership, our product got shelved. Laid off. - 2024-2025: SaaS company. 1 year contract. Budget was cut and couldn't be renewed. - 2025-today: Fintech company. Survived a round of layoffs but hate the job. Looking to leave. Were it up to me, I would've happily stayed at any of the three jobs forever. I'm willing to c”

“Hi all, I’m a IT support specialist with 6 years of experience in a school environment (I’ve worked there from before I graduated to now even after graduating it’s my only experience). I have a Bachelors in Cybersecurity and have worked in everything from hardware repair to switch and VLAN configuration. My work environment has been rough lately. Which from other people in ed tech I’ve spoken too is no surprise in smaller school environments, where politics and relations may cause some tension.”

“Now that the entry level has shrunk so much, it feels like the meritocracy tech was known for has taken a huge blow and it now functions more similarly to finance or law. Personal projects don't move the needle anymore (MAYBE something genuinely complex AND with a substantial amount of PAYING users) and the importance of leetcode seems to be slowly fading. The only "sure thing" way to get in now is to excel in a strong university program and make full use of their internship connec”

“For some context, I am a computer science bachelor's student graduating in 2 months and I am looking forward to pursuing higher education. So I have always been academically outstanding and been told many times that I could explain stuff very well. Additionally, I believe in the effect of research work and I wanna contribute to it. I feel so passionate about changing the world via research. Now that I am graduating, I have to choose what path should I follow. When I looked at the fields I ca”

“I'll be brief I have an associates from 2015 very little market experience (gamedev and other projects on my own) the past three years I've been doing restaurant work because in 2023 it was obvious the market crashed hard. I set some target goals, found a chrome bug earlier months ago but it was a duplicate and they lowered rewards.. Now i have a years savings, and need to transition out. I'm probably going part time to 2 days a week next month to cover expenses because I'm regul”

“Hi everyone, If I were to dedicate my entire life to mastering one skill and becoming one of the best in a single field, what would you recommend? I'm looking for something I can keep improving at for the rest of my life—something I can build a career around, earn a great living from, and genuinely enjoy spending 16 hours a day doing. For example, someone can get certified to operate a forklift, learn the job once, and that's pretty much it. There isn't an endless path of growth. I&#”

“Yes, and while there are outliers, the SWEs there tend to be lower on the competence spectrum. If that's the only job you can find take it, getting a job is easier when you have experience even if it might be considered lower tier. But if you just stated the hunt then keep applying. You can also take the job and keep searching”

“For sure experience > projects. That said, it'd only take an hour or two to run your best project over AI and have it mobile friendly, cleaned up, and deployed live so recruiters can click on something. Wouldn't they just say he doesn't have HTML/CSS/JS experience mentioned and discard me then? You know Python and seem to have experience in it, plus you know other languages, specifically, some typed ones that are more in-depth. That said, you should probably know typescript as it&”

“Greetings all. I wanted to get some advice from you fine folks. Last year, I got lucky and landed an IT position for an MSP. I've been working in the MSP role for a year as an "IT Systems Engineer," which is basically a mix of remote and on-site support for clients across many different industries. The position pays pretty low and is super stressful at times, but I have seen and learned a lot in this role. I recently also passed my Network+. I'm now studying for my Security+ an”

“I'm 31, finishing up my bachelor's in CS in a few months. I make $80k right now in tech sales. But I really hate working in sales, I've never liked it and have always been fairly average at it. I switched jobs often. So I decided to go back and finish the degree I half-completed 12 years ago. But I'm sort of in an awkward spot where I've got 12 years of professional work experience on my resume, and soon I'll be transferring to a mostly unrelated field. I know I'm alm”

“Currently in 5 th sem (about to start) (CS student). Done with dsa (completed dsa but still not that good in leetcode can solve 2-3 in contests of lc) No projects just a dbms project of academics can someone guide which path to follow to land a good job and internship ? Many of my friends recommended Andrew NG coursera course on ML and told me that's enough for placement while I looked in campus X yt and I find it the road map to be good at ml or master ml to be overwhelming and gave that ro”

“Yeah, this is something I very much agree with. Just have a computer‑literacy course FFS. I think I'm quite happy, or maybe even lucky, to be in a position where we only hire people who AT LEAST know how to use a computer There are some edge cases where someone is either extremely knowledgeable or has an entire network in a certain the industry, but we will make that work. In general, if you don't know how to turn on your computer, then you're just not going to get hired in any posit”

“Agreed. Worked in finance for quite a while as well and same goes there. Either words or numbers. You know what the most annoying part is? I know a couple of people who can do both. Hard to compete with those lol.”

“hey guys, looking for some career advice since i really dont have much direction right now. im a CS major at an above average state school, graduating a semester early at the end of this fall. things havent really gone my way up to this point and i figured id ask people who actually know the field instead of just guessing. for context, i was basically following the herd and chasing the normal SWE/data path like most CS majors do. i never really sat down and asked myself if that was something i a”

“To make a long story short, I am going back to school(Community College then maybe transferring to College/University). Growing up I've always been really into Technology and Computers, so I've decided on getting a Computer Science degree. But lately I've been skeptic about it, mainly with current events and the increase of companies using Ai. Now I am debating on picking another field to get a degree on but don't know what. Am I overthinking it? Also what would be a better alter”

“I recently graduated with a Computer Science degree and I'm trying to break into IT. My long term goal is to become a network engineer, but I think getting experience at an MSP would be the best way to learn as much as possible. Right now I have: CS degree AD homelab of which I've built a domain controller and file server, configured AD DS, DNS, users, groups, OUs, etc. Im still adding stuff like Group Policy, DHCP, while documenting everything on GitHub. Data analyst internship Customer”

“Sets you up for IaC and cloud roles. Also mid senior level all ask for this now, hard to get passed 2nd or first line interview if you don’t do that”

“The software industry is cruel to "average" developers. People who want to become staff SWEs are constantly upskilling and taking the time even outside of work to do personal projects and read HackerNews and all that, to stay on top of the new technologies.”

“I am probably going to include way too much information in this post, but I want to give a fully accurate picture of what I currently do. At my job, I am regularly praised for having a clean and organized work station. My boss has praised it, people from other departments have praised it, and most recently, a contractor who came by praised it. My job is niche, but incredibly simple. I clean and picture salvage motorcycle parts. Someone dismantles the bike, my job is to get the broken down bike,”

“With all the doom and gloom going around I wanted to share my success story recently. For Reference, I’m entering my Senior year as a CS student at a no name school (satellite campus of state school) and I wanted to share that I officially signed my Full Time offer earlier this week as an Automation Engineer in the industrial Industry. It’s at a competitor of the company I’m currently interning at, but they like me so much they want to have me fully remote during the spring at $30/hr and then st”

“is systems administrator the only path to cloud engineer? submitted by /u/False_Bee4659 [link] [comments]”

“I can't deny this is true, but it hasn't made me hate my job. More than anything, I'm trying to figure out how to thrive in a very different environment. I've definitely realized that sitting there and handcrafting my code to try to make it perfect isn't what my employer is going to want; they want a balanced trade-off. So, I need to find a good split in the middle where I can still add value by using my experience and skills to shape good quality, maintainable code, but I also am trying to use”

“10+ years in, can code in my sleep, and still feel this way sometimes. Mucking through tech debt and seeing and fixing mistakes is how you learn what good code looks like and what’s an anti pattern of mistake. At some point it’s declining returns and enforcing bad habit. Try to step back and build fresh to level up. IMO you have reality and your dream stack. You need to maintain / grow both skills and try and figure out how to make them converge / improve legacy stems.”

“Harsh truth. Your resume looks like amateur hour. I’m not criticizing your experience . Putting on your resume that your skills include “git” and “jira” is about like saying you can type. It’s the same with listing which IDEs you can use. Also I never list skills separately. You say how you use Docker, Python etc to accomplish things. Saying you know something doesn’t make you any different than thousands of others. And for the love of all that is holy, put your education at the bottom and remov”

Sounds like a fun hobby.

“I think what you're seeing is specialization taking form. You can't be a master of everything. You can try, you wind up being kinda good at whatever you hack at. Jack of all, master of none. Web is cool because it's the interface all this stuff uses to connect and interrelate. I don't think you're missing out on anything. I've done master of none, it's a lot of fun. Maybe a sense you should stfu and listen when the actual experts are talking. My view is having that le”

“I don't think that ITIL or actually any other certification should be your top priority. First step will be to find out what they expect you to do, then it's time for "learning by doing". Durig that time your beard will grow on it's own ;)”

“I think my general advice, especially for people new in their career is instead of relying on getting certificates once you get a job, instead focus on the environment you're working in. Knowledge will come naturally this way, don't do both or you'll burn yourself out. Watch some YouTube video in the background, learn through Osmosis ;).”

“any insight on the "hiring is rough"? I thought TA experience would kind of make me stand out tbh. Is html/css/javascript project worth talking about? Or should I remove that and keep everything else?”

“So what does that actually mean? Couldn't I talk about my work xp with them?”

“tbh you probably know more than you think you do. The "so many things to learn" feeling usually means you're trying to map out everything at once instead of just picking the next thing. What specifically do you feel stuck on, backend? deployment? databases? Narrowing it down helps a lot.”

“You don't strictly need projects, but you may need past experience to talk about with a hiring manager who wants to know what you're bringing to the table.”

“keep like one solid project that shows html css js, drop weaker stuff or old ta stuff, hiring is rough now”

“You would be considered a junior at most companies, but just apply to any position you think you could reasonably do. There's no discrete industry wide measurement.”

“How many of us out there do everything from Helpdesk to systems engineering level work? If you have, and you left a job like that, how comfortable were you moving to a more specialized role? As an example, the breadth of my responsibility includes: M365/Azure (GA) Cloud telephony (built, migrated, maintain) Networking (stand up sites, investigate, etc) Intune (stood up and maintain it) Faxing (walk up & cloud) Citrix VDI (update, spinup/down, add webapps, etc) vSphere (build, migrate, tweak,”

“I'm about to graduate with an engineering degree in software engineering. I study night courses while working full time in a company as a web dev for over three years now. During the program we covered a huge amount of stuff. Big data machine learning deep learning data warehousing business intelligence on top of the regular software engineering track. I've been working as a web developer for over three years doing full stack work backend and frontend and some devops on the side like CI/”

“I’ve been working as a SysOps engineer for a year, and it’s what I’ve been doing since I graduated. I was wondering: if you were in my shoes, what would you invest your time in? How do you see the future of our profession with the rise of AI? submitted by /u/Natural_Pool_5493 [link] [comments]”

“Hey everyone, I recently graduated from a T25 and joined the FLDP at a Fortune 50 company. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion around post-program opportunities, especially given some recent changes that have created a bit more uncertainty than expected. As I think ahead and prepare for life after the program, I’m curious about the exit opportunities available to FLDP graduates. In your experience, what tends to matter most when recruiting afterward: the specific rotations you completed, th”

“Hello all! I am a 20 year old who's currently getting their degree in Computer Science. I have been thinking , though, and I'm worried about the job search once I'm out of college. I need to explain a bit further; I have ADHD and Autism, and long story short, as such, I have some unusual wants from my future career and am wondering what you would suggest I look into specifically. First off, I hate being a leader as well as socializing in general/public speaking, which I know is a HUG”

“I see my peers attending all the hackathons and events while vibe coding various projects with javascript and python and gaining a lot of traction on linkedin. I feel left out and quite behind them as I'm trying to cover depths of core java, spring, postgreSQL, logging, and AWS. Despite trying to learn and master the foundational technologies of enterprise applications, I feel like an imposter among them with zero end to end project while they pump out a whole end to end project every other”

“I had applied to a job role (SE in an AD Tech firm) which had 2-5 yoe as a requirement, even though I have just completed my master's. One of my friend suggested me to apply anyway for this even after I knew that I am not eligible ACC to YOE criteria. They said it won't matter that much. Today got a mail by recruiter to share resume and some more details. What to do? Some background: Have done a react internship ~6 months during BTech and an AI/ML internship for 6months during Mtech fina”

“I used to work as a software engineer for 5 years. Got into coding when I was 13, passionate about problem solving rather than debating over programming languages and these days trying to get most out of AI instead of using that as a buzzword for funding. Was deeply involved in AI research during my early college days. I’d left my software job to do startup fulltime. I obsess on talking to customers and making them happy, instead of working alone building without any feedback. I want to solve ac”

“Probably asked a million times before, but I couldn't really figure out what to search... I used to be a really strong software engineer. When I was in my twenties, I worked at a place where I was one of the strongest engineers in a department of 40 mostly older people. I was able to weave magic with C, C++, Assembly, Java, and later, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and ActionScript along with whatever database we happened to be using. I always thought it weird that I was able to do a lot of things”

“I have got around 2 years of experience now. Graduated in 2024 with my bachelors in CS and the job market wasn't that cooked. However I work for a WITCHA company (MAANG term for Service Based Companies fyi) and as a fresher I didn't get to learn much. Honestly, I'm stuck in a CyberArk PAM support role and the work is very repetitive. No new challenges like ever. Everything is done based on SOP. I've done some automation work here and there in my team but honestly I want to pivot”

“Hey everyone, I’m currently feeling incredibly stuck and anxious about my career path, and I could really use some perspective from people who are actually in the industry. Right now, I am working as an analyst trainee at a service-based IT company. I recently graduated with a computer applications background. During my training and personal time, I fell in love with DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure . I’ve put a ton of effort into building skills here: I've done deep dives into AWS (EC2, S3,”

“hello! new grad with a double major in CS and business looking for advice. i had 2 internships at tech companies (no full-time offer rip) and a few light projects from classes but i haven't had any success with getting swe/tech roles. i'd like to improve my odds and try to get a decent tech job--any advice other than leetcoding to pass technicals? i was thinking about getting a cert or maybe doing some personal projects, but for the most part i'm not sure what direction i should go.”

“I didn't know how else to word it, in September I'm going to a Degree Apprenticeship (UK) as a Software Engineer, so degree & 3 YOE at the end. The degree is called Computing Systems, and covers roughly the same practical stuff as Computer Science (from what I can tell by looking at the modules) but is not a degree in computer science exactly. Will this limit applications to bigger companies (FAANG, maybe) that do cutting edge technologies, big use systems and possibly research? &#32”

“Hello everyone, I've recently been preparing for Data Engineer/ Business Intelligence Engineer roles with AWS Cloud & Apache Spark, Kafka as my main technical focus. I have around a year of total experience as a Data Engineer (used a legacy/ outdated tech stack here, but the foundations are transferable) & Data Analyst. Some background: During my time as a Data Engineer, I had an amazing team; everyone was willing to look at each other's projects and help/ give advice. But after”