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Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.
- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.
- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.
- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.
Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.
When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.15 -
My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.
In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.3 -
Wanted to make a website with some of my friends about whatever kid thing we were into at the time. None of our parents cared, it was the 90s and nobody took the internet seriously.
Copied and pasted bits of html into notepad and FTPed them to some free webhost over dialup. The website lasted three weeks -- my friends got bored, I got hooked.
A few years later I found myself wondering why some websites used ".php" instead of ".html". I discovered this shiny new thing called PHP 4. Built a website for some video game I was into using it. Spent the next two years teaching myself everything there was to know.
Took programming in high school. Chose CS over mechanical engineering because I liked the university better. Got an internship which turned into a job which turned into a career.1 -
few years back,I wanted to be become supercar designer or weapon designer.
Due low grade in 12th.I got admission in computer science instead of mechanical.
c was introduced in 1st sem.
Score well in first year.
college offer me to change my field cs -> mechanical
4 year later (now)
2 drop's
1) due to health
2) financial issues
happy to be full stack developer.
still like cars and weapons but choosed cs as my real career.16 -
Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life
> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.12 -
My father while I was tinkering in the workshop :
"You see, I think you chose the wrong studies, you would have liked something else like material science a lot more."
At this moment my face took a question mark shape.
"Wait.. What? I mean... You know, I quit mechanical engineering to computer science, I actually made this decision because I thought it was better for me."
Him :
"But you will never have a good job in it. Material science for example is the booming industry, it's the future."
"What the... No, just no. Every year at my university several mechanical engineering students get thrown out because they can't even find an internship. Whereas most CS students find more than one and end up sharing job offers with their friends. And talk about an interesting job, in the mechanical domain everything already exists and it's just a matter of applying the same boring standards over and over again, when it's not just pure technician managing. In CS new technologies and tools appear regularly, keeping it interesting because evolution is hardly limited by real life physics, just by one's brain."
Pissed me off.8 -
being told to lead a team of junior developers for a project when i was 18
i never had any formal CS education so i thought the management was joking, but a week after, i was called into a meeting with the junior developers and we were tasked with a project that needs to be completed within 4 months, with me as the lead
the project was successful and after that im occasionally given the task to lead a project every now and then
this happened a few years ago and its still the most confidence-boosting experience ever happened to me, the things i learned during those 4 months are still applicable to my career today15 -
Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.
First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.
Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.
Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.
Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.
Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.
What a shitty start to a career as a developer.
Anybody having a similar experience?
5 -
College rant:
I have finals next week. I am sitting here learning about things which have no benefit to my career. My college requires me to take Calculus based physics 2, which makes no sense to me at all! I do appreciate physics however I would much rather be coding. In my CS courses you learn theory which is fine, however very impractical. I last October I realized how much more you need to do and a degree just won't cut it. I spend about 50 hours a week learning TDD, git, hashes all this stuff that is not taught in school. Then on top of this I'm learning pointless crap that if I ever needed in a real world situation I would go to Kahn Academy or simply Google it. I'm upset because I have to stop coding for the week to study information I will forget 2 weeks from now, and most likely never use again. I have a job someone offered me which will be extremely beneficial to my career however I have to wait a week to even look at it. I'm just bitter.23 -
Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.
In short, coding changed everything for me.
PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer. -
Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.5 -
This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.
So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).
Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.
Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.
I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)
This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.
This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)8 -
Sometimes, while coding, I get distracted by a tiny voice telling me: "Stop that! You're at work!"
But then I think: "Well, coding IS work."
To which the tiny voice replies: "Yes, but it's not YOUR work."
Damn you, tiny voice, I hate when you are right.
My current career(completely unrelated to programming or even CS) is probably my greatest distraction... and I hate that. =P2 -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
We need to normalize not being a passionate CS guru. You can be good at your job and not have passion for it. You don't have to dedicate your life to your career in every facet.
I don't expect plumbers to sit around their house all day during their free time hooking up water lines. Why is it expected that I'm always reading some dev book or learning some new framework or reading some tech blog?
I do other shit, and that's fine. My job earns me a paycheck and I'll improve on the clock, and when I walk out at the end of the day I leave that shit there.
At most I might converse with you informally about tech but I'm not going to spend my little free time going to meetups and pretending like I care more than I do. If you do that's great, but I'm not you and that's fuckin fine too.10 -
It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.
My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.
Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.
There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"4 -
Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "
Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.
What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.
I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.
Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();5 -
I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...
well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.
I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.
So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.2 -
Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit
Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.
I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.
I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:
- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10
uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.
So here's where the story becomes a rant.
In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.
And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.
So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.
The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?
gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3
(:1 -
Friends/Seniors : "Hey, you should take these courses. They are easy and you can get easily an A!"
Who the fuck decide what optional courses to take based on if it's easy or not?!
Students take them because :
a. They are interested in the subjects
b. Knowledge/skills after attending the courses will be beneficial for future career.
I put my money more on option b though, i.e I'd rather get C's in courses that I found it useful, than getting A's in useless courses.
(Btw, my avg grade is just a little above Cs)
If my sole purpose was just to get straight A's, I would enroll in liberal art courses instead of this stressing half-CS course we're in.
You're a joke to yourself, that's why I don't hang out with you.3 -
How do you deal with anti-competitive clauses in contracts with your employer?
I have found them to be unavoidable here in the field of IT/CS related fields, and I don't want that to affect my future career as much.
My current strategy is to gain more of other skills than just in software development, so I can fall back on those skills for a different field (e.g. DevOps, sysadmin, ...) instead of being unemployed for a year because I didn't like my workplace anymore.
The only other way I can think of would be to open my own company, but I'm not going to be ready to do that right after school.
Any other thoughts?3 -
One problem for CS education is that the salaries for academia are so low compared to industry that if someone is even vaguely competent, they can at least double their income by working a 'real' job. Now this may be different at higher levels of colleges but generally those folks are such bullshitters they wouldn't last outside of academia.
As what to improve?
Depends if it's a research or vocational course.
For vocational; heavy on group projects, common tools, methodologies and architectures. All demonstrated in something like c#/java/python. And one project must have a web app (db, app layer and JavaScript from end)
Basic knowledge of algorithms, runtime analysis (O notation) and some data structures and you're an instahire.
For research, go wild. Deep dive into the math, algorithmic side. Read up lots of research papers. Try out different programming paradigms. You would aim for a career in academia, AI, quant finance etc...2 -
soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.
end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev
so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state
i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games
i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play
just need to rant it out rn4 -
Hi guys some advice would be appreciated.
I’m new here but have followed for a long time. I enjoy coding in my spare time, particularly web development but I am looking to make it my career.
Currently I work in mental health as a social worker, but ultimately the stress of the job and life in general has led to me being detained in a psychiatric hospital. So I’ve decided I need change.
I want to start a career I want to be in and that is as a developer. In terms of education, I started a degree in maths/cs a long time ago but stopped due to life events at the time. All the rest of my qualifications are around social work.
I’ve been doing my best to learn with Udemy and free code camp. Mainly looking at JavaScript. I also used to work in a charity where I did some (bad) php development and front end work.
Are there any self made developers out there who have any advice for me? I’m looking at doing a bootcamp but dunno if that will help at all.
Any help or advice would be really welcome. Cheers guys :)23 -
My path to software development was: Hardware Engineer, Helpdesk Analyst, self-taught Junior C# Developer...
Will not studying CS become a hinderance later in my career?14 -
As a person who never took any CS courses, I don't really see the market value of them, apart from getting through ignorant degree gating at companies with backward corporate philosophies.
As I understand, even a degree isn't really that helpful in getting your foot in the door.
That said, the week 92 question assumes there is something wrong with the nature of CS instruction. College is not trade school. The point of it is to get an education, not a job. Many employers require that education, and that's their prerogative, but for a number of reasons, chief among them being the rapid pace of the advance of technological concepts, most employers do not.
A candidate having a CS undergraduate degree is far less attractive to an employer than one without a degree, but who has a year or two of experience with the technologies the position involves.
That said, I personally think that as college is for an education and not career building, computer science curricula should focus on theory, and not on applied technology. A focus on the latter just guarantees that the subject material will be dated and irrelevant.
But as many people (maybe even most) think college is trade school, I think it's absolute madness to enter into debt slavery in exchange for expiring qualifications.3 -
!rant
I think that more than learning about CS, I learned how to cope with enormous amounts of frustration that comes with being a dev and I also felt great when I was being challenged with actual deadlines through exams, hackathons, assignments, practicals and tough professors.
Professionally, I think the great knowledge of fundamentals of CS helps a lot and it is just a great way to get your foot inside the door (for internship interviews and career opportunities) of a company and then show what you're made of when it comes to being a dev.
Also, I had the time of my life because I was around like-minded people who loved the same things and it was good to watch them suffer at first and then, watch them succeed at something that I was about to do. -
I was once a guy fascinated by the world of computers , games and tech stuff. And today in my 21 and almost 6 months before my graduation ( as a fucking "CS" engineer) , i feel almost everything in CS as difficult or boring , even the things i am usually good at , and by looking at the competition, i am scared if this career is ever going to be fruitful for me :(8
-
Recent discussion with ele gave me an idea to post this question here.
Which type of company should a fresh CS graduate work for? A corporate or a startup or a SME.
My advice for newbies is on SME for first few years. Then decide on your own based on your personality and career goals for future years.16 -
I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)
(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗
First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂
Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.
I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.1 -
Why are most jobs just about web development or mobile development? (I'm not criticizing I'm a mobile developer myself)
Is it JUST purely because of the market need and people using them?
Share your opinion on this one and what other career paths in CS do you know about you think would benefit from more people in them.2 -
This is why we can never have enough software developers
It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.
Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.
Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.
Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.
Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.
Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.
Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.
A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.
If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.
With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work. -
Hi all devRanters (if that is a thing),
I'm currently in grade 10, and I'm looking forward to a career in computer programming. I find that sometimes Maths is very intimidating, as such, I want to ask all of the devs here: is Maths really that crucial to the job? Or is it merely a requirement to go to university and get a CS degree?
Thanks in advance!8 -
Monday marks the beginning of a new month. In the new month, I turn a year older. As I steer further and further away from "youthfulness", I intend on starting a new chapter in my life.
Sunday 28th Feb is the last day I put any investment towards my "white-collar" professional career. Beginning March 1st, all my energy is going towards my entrepreneurial career instead.
This means that instead of learning that Huawei HCIA networking certification that I hate, I'm going to continue learning Docker (then Kubernetes) which I intend to use on my first product & the many more to come. Instead of studying the horrifyingly boring Data Science course, I'm instead going to put my energy behind understanding GCP & AWS, with the hopes of eventually getting certified.
Basically, I'm going to put all my energy into learning technologies that interest me AND have the potential to help me deliver on my entrepreneurial journey faster & better, rather than studying certifications which everyone believe will make me more employable.
Unfortunately, there aren't that many jobs going around & I'm currently under a year long internship with extremely smart graduates (a valedictorian included). The joke is we're earning $250 a month and have zero hope of getting employed anytime soon. I'm tired of going down this path.
I'm glad I got my degree in CS, now onto creating job opportunities for my fellow peers!
PS: Expect rants about my entrepreneurship challenges, and celebrations about my entrepreneurship wins!2 -
For US salaried developers here, a young soon-to-be employed graduate has a question...
When it comes to salaried work, is it just a matter of work "close to 40 hours but really just get your work done" or should I be trying to fill a seat for 8 hours a day even if I don't have anything to work on? And if I'm non-exempt (elligible for overtime over 40hrs), is it reasonable for me to be here 9 hours a day, or should I be capping it off at 8?
I know these are questions for my employer but it's gonna be a bit before I actually start work and I'm curious.9 -
I think the advantage of CS is that it forces you to explore things you might not think interest you, it also gives a general base and vocabulary to speak "the language" of this career. With that said I often look to hire people without CS degrees but that has the motivation to learn by themselves (I'm self-taught). The degree doesn't say much about, but if during it you explore, stay curious, look beyond 20y/o outdated advice from some professors you'd get the most out of it.
Start making a portfolio even before starting college and stay curious! -
Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.
I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.
Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.
Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.
Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.
I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.1 -
Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.
tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.
For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.
After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.
Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.
At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.
I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.
I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.
I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.4 -
Fate chose Computer Science for me.
It's only after 1st semester of Computer Science Undergraduate Program that I came across C, my first programming language. I had no idea what a CS Degree is all about. It was a blind shot, to be honest.
I wrote a few programs and fell in love with coding. I got high after solving every problem. I craved for more. It's all magical!
I'm enjoying every moment of my developer career. It's a hell lot of fun! I'm glad that my blind shot turned out be a good one. -
Guys, this is not a rant. But I need a career advice. I don’t have a BD in CS, but I studied by myself and took some other classes and was working in the field for more than an year now after graduating from university. I do full stack developing with javascript and sometimes java at a startup now.
My goal was to eventually get to grad school in CS. I found some programs what accept students from non CS back grounds too. I can’t do BD again it will take too long. And I’m old ! lol
If any of you had similar experiences, or know some good programs would you let me know? Should I prepare portfolio or should I accomplish something great in order to get accepted? Or should I just try applying first? I’m focusing more on east coast to choose schools from but open to anything for now.
It’s quite scary to really start working on this since I already have a job and there are so much information regarding grad school, I get overwhelmed. Though it’s something i need to overcome. It would be really helpful for me if you could share your two cents.
I love what I do now, and really hope that I get to study further and explore in depth. Also I’m interested in AI or machine learning. Also if you know good source for reading recently published papers on CS let me know!
Thanks for reading! :)10 -
>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met
I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?6 -
Last week I've been really wanting to start learning a new language. Not the programming type but the original type. Mainly for career opportunities, as I am getting into 2nd year of a 5 year cs curriculum.
Already know : English, Greek (native)
Currently deciding between:
French
Indian
Chinese (not Korean, maybe Japanese?)
Opinions? :)8 -
!rant
Question to the devs that hire.
Would you hire a developer with the qualifications:
- knows multiple programming languages (can be any but knows them well)
- has worked the past 6 years in the field however worked during his school life.
- started of career in web development and worked with high end clients, (big corps, businesses, celebs)
- does not have a CS or Engineering Degree (has a different degree that is remotely related)
- has failed his A Level exams (pre-college, high school board exams by Cambridge) (not that this matters)
Disclaimer: This is not about me. I was in an argument with my extended family about the importance of grade school education in work. My family consists of Teachers and School Administrators entirely. The above point all define me and I was successful enough to earn more than what my family does early on when joining college. I did however fail my alevels only to get a scholarship in a great University for my field.5 -
A bit long, sorry.
I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.
I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.
Can I get a stress ball? 😅 -
I have a CS undergrad friend who is not learning anything outside of uni and in my country, that will automatically kill your career. I am trying to get him to start coding and learning new languages and frameworks, and do projects, but he has a full time job as a cashier and doesn’t have the time. But i know if I get him to do these things he could probably find a part time dev job that pays just as much. How can you help a complete rookie become a dev in the least amount of time and effort ?3
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Revature. Does anyone have experience with them. I have been approached by them but half of me thinks it feels like scam. I look online at Glassdoor and they have good reviews but on Reddit they are pretty polar. What is everyone's opinion here?
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Hey guys, I want to do a cyber security career. For me it's the most interesting field in CS. How can I get started? Is it worth to do some online courses where you get certifications (asking this because they are kind of pricey). I'm a QA Tester with 1 year of work experience, don't know if I should just apply to jobs or acquire skills/certificates first. Thanks for all the incoming answers. :D5
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!rant
Tomorrow I'll be doing my last CS exam (Data Warehousing, somebody shoot me). I'm pumped to dive in on that Android certification course I was awarded by udacity.
However I'll probably need to move to the capital or a bigger city to get a proper career on what I like. Small towns suck. Anyone else had this experience?1 -
Is it possible to know everything and every concepts in computer science or should I focus my career in one particular area of cs... ??!1
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i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.
i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:
1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year
>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less
2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%
>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here
3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree
4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.
1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?
2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?
3. how do you grow as a manager?
honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:
1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company
2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.
3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.
4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.
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in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?
also how can one start to become x?6
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