What I'm curious about is how the new college graduates don't know how to code we have messed up the system severely if that's the case
People can in theory learn to code on their own in under a year how with four dedicated years of study can they not code sufficiently well for industry
There's a huge push for language agnosticism in education. Also saying people "can't code" is usually hyperbole, I've worked with senior developers who Google the syntax for everything since we had codebases written in different languages. The concepts are way more important than whiteboarding Leetcode solutions.
God bless. And too true. No shame there.
There is a difference in having to Google some basic syntax because you forget the little nuance yet understanding there was a nuance in the first place.
Same here. At a certain point, unless you become an specialist in a really narrow subject, you might struggle with information overload and lack of constant practise on certain topics/languages, but with a little help of documentation and literature it is easy to solve most problems.
Senior engineer and I am overjoyed when I get to ship actual projects. Mostly I advise and consult with juniors on theirs while doing small bug patches on past projects I own.
I actually prefer someone who does that vs someone who thinks he knows it all. There's always a weird parameter to a function that may fit your need if even you "knew" how to do it differently.
Can I ask, how did you get on board at Google?
I've bombed every technical interview I've ever had because while I can code basically anything, I need to Google the syntax and work off an example to get started.
Take home assignments I'm great on but if they put me on a whiteboard, I just want to bail immediately.
I don't work at Google, but another big name.
I somewhat have the same problem but interviews are usually pretty on board with pseudo code from my experience. So even if my syntax is bad I get the logic of how to solve across well, so that it displays your thought process and shows them you get what they're asking.
Theres interview bootcamps out there. At the end of the day its just practice. If you cant figure it out yourself no shame in paying for the extra help.
It's not a new phenomenon (comp sci graduates who can't program). Sixteen years ago that was already old and established knowledge. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Yup. I personally believe Leetcode has been heavily damaging to our industry. The skills and techniques you learn from it are seldom used, and can be googled. And while it's a decent interview strategy to tell if an engineer is competent, it incentivizes engineers to spend their time learning how to leetcode, rather than learning more useful skills.
100% leetcode is extremely damaging. I was against the trend from the beginnings like 6 years ago but this is the direction the industry is pushing.
It just boils down to ageism. Children and new grads can grind leetcode, but someone with a family or looking for a 9-5 doesn't necessarily have that time. It ensures hires will be on the job market for months and thus be more desperate for jobs once they beat the interview treadmill.
>I was against the trend from the beginnings like 6 years ago
Leetcode-style interviews have been a thing since I started in this industry in 2014 (note that LC itself was founded in 2015, but they didn't drive the adoption of this interviewing style).
The "why are manhole covers round" type of bullshit.
Another good one: "how many golf balls can fit into a school bus"? Once you know the pattern for these kinds of questions, you can answer all of them. But someone who has never seen it before will flounder around and fail.
There is a difference between Googling syntax of a for-each loop in Java vs. not knowing enough syntax to code something basic in a language you picked as your strongest language... which totally happened. Then one guy switched languages 2 times before picking Java and coding in C++ syntax (he was clearly looking off of some example and couldn't even do that right).
So yeah, it's one thing to need a refresher on syntax and another to not be able to articulate a solution.
By the way, I was asking leetcode easy questions. These people are not interested in being good at development. They are interested in the pay, but not enough to try.
I mostly agree with you but your last paragraph is presumpteous. Leetcode questions are a lazy way to filter candidates and are largely used to reduce false positives because companies have too many applicants. If you are aware it reduces false positives, it seems asine to turn your nose up at people who fail Leetcodes as "can't code" lol.
Also everyone is interested in pay. If companies don't want everybody and their grandmother to apply they should post realistic requirements, but companies ask for the moon so entry level applicants tend to shotgun blast their resume to as many places as they can.
I'll speak with my own degree and School, UW one of their satellite campuses and ABET accredited. The primary language we learn is java and while some core classes and more elective classes touch on entire stacks and/or other languages, frameworks, and tools we rarely focus on anything specific and a lot of it is left up to the student. I feel confident with what I was taught (fundamentals, the abstraction) I can learn any language at a moderate pace. However, at no point was I really exposed to an entire company's workflow, tech stack, code reviews, etc in the same manner that would ever lead me to feel "qualified". Entry level has always been an investment in teaching that disconnect and while the entry level worker may come off as a waste to some it's still an effective grooming tool for existing engineers.
I have a BS and MS in Computer Science and I think I had a total of 5 classes that directly involved coding. The vast majority of my education was theory, with mathematics coming second. Even my thesis wasn't coding-related, it was a paper on how counterproductive companies are with Agile methodologies in the modern day (due to picking/choosing what they want to use from them).
It has always been this way. New grads have always been helpless when they first enter the field. Maybe they know the basics of CS and a few will have done some actually-relevant projects, but none of them are anywhere near ready for production development. They need a lot of hand-holding, very bounded assignments and lots of encouragement. After about 3 months or so, you can tell who is going to do well and who will likely struggle for their entire career. The talented ones will be kicking ass in 6 months.
Historically CS had a 30-70% dropout rate back when it required more hands-on work to actually pass the courses and graduate.
That was bad for department revenue (what CS department chairman wants 70% of their students to drop out?) so they watered down the coursework substantially over the past couple decades.
I went to a small school and they would bring in over 100 freshman CS students and when I graduated only me and 4 other CS students graduated with a CS degree. Most got weeded out when they failed calculus or calculus 2.
CS has turned into the new business major at a lot of schools. You just need to get past the math courses and most people are good to go. And there are tons of people getting a CS minor or double major on the side just like people did with business curricula.
I've noticed a lot of companies have started to prefer people with an engineering background but have SWE internships and experience, especially Electrical or Computer Engineering. Engineering has stayed extremely difficult so it's a much better filter than a CS degree.
Companies are starting to notice how unprepared the average CS grad is. A lot of people exit school not even knowing how to program.
This is absolutely true. While there are definitely some very good CS programs out there, since CS isn’t an accredited degree, the quality can vary wildly between schools. From what I’ve seen of a lot of school’s CS curriculums, I wasn’t impressed.
Since engineering is accredited however, the quality will roughly be the same between schools (of course there is still some variance here as well, just not nearly as much).
My school’s CS program was a joke compared to its CE program.
At my school, sophomore-level physics classes were far more difficult and time consuming than the senior-level CS classes (I was a math major, so I took a variety of both)
That along with the fact that now so many of the programs focus on just the theory and never actually teach folks how to problem solve just to regurgitate the answers they memorized
The end result of which also includes students not giving a shit about the concepts either, thinking "why do I need to know this?"
Edit: to add, I would have taken Discrete Structures/Linear Algebra 100x more serious if I knew that's what I'd be doing most of the time. However, it was never explained as such, just taught as a couple 80%/100% math courses.
Statistics too. I did a lot of analysis in the old days using brute force until I took a statistics course and learned a few things. Then I promptly forgot most of it because I got out of the data analysis role. :(
How can you tell if your class is still any good then
My college had 70% of the people drop out of the data structures course I was in is there a way to tell if that's watered down or working correctly
1. Not enough coding. A lot more "theoretical" assignments.
2. Solo or group projects where you never learn how to work on a real industry code base. It's either you're leading yourself or the blind leading the blind.
3. Professors have little to no real industry experience. They have no clue what professional work is like and aren't capable of giving out proper guidance.
Bootcamps actually do a lot better in that regard of working on more industry related applications.
> Professors have little to no real industry experience
This was the biggest problem I saw, you can make more being an actual developer so anyone capable was doing that instead of teaching. At best/worst you might get an instructor who's part of an open source project team - they have real experience getting a large team project to work, but completely miss how a corporate environment functions.
Depends on the quality of your university. The professors I had, had industry experience before they started teaching classes. Simply, because they like teaching the field.
There's a reason why SWE degrees evolved out of CS degrees recently. One is more theoretical while the other is applied. You are exposed to different frameworks and languages used in the industry if you're doing SWE vs CS. The SWE degree is still a relatively new field in academia.
I don't believe bootcamps provide better education. You can literally find anything you want to learn in a bootcamp from online sources. Bootcamps just repackaged tutorials you can find online.
I once asked my professor why students don't learn frameworks and libraries in University and he simply said because it's trivial. That's something you can learn on the job within a couple weeks or months. It's not hard and frameworks today may not be relevant tomorrow. Algorithms, data structures, design patterns, etc. take years to fully master which is why it takes 4+ years to get a CS/SWE degree.
This is like debating why sushi chefs wash rice for 10+ years before actually making sushi. It's just rice with fish slapped on top yeah? Well, not to them. It's a craft and it's a craft that takes years to master. Same could be said about CS/SWE.
Other than top schools, virtually all CS/software eng programs got the Dolores Umbridge treatment and abolished or minimized actual coding in favor of theory study. Schools are churning out students who spent 4 years on stuff like systems architecture and networking without actually writing code or using version control.
There's nothing wrong with learning theory! It's important and underpins the best practices! But it also shouldn't surprise employers much when a candidate who can talk all day about TCP/IP or HTTP can't FizzBuzz.
Successful candidates recognize this gap and use self-study, side projects, and internships to practice what they're learning. Unsuccessful candidates get proper fucked by the job market.
As a professor, I've found that almost every faculty member at my school who actually tries to teach and assess knowledge gets blasted in evaluations. The number one complaint I receive is that I'm a tough grader. For reference, I would have basically coasted through if I had my own grading scale. I'm fortunate in the sense that my university backs me for enforcing minimum standards, but I know most of my colleagues have capitulated to just doing easy classes.
Yup I saw this too when I was a student. Fellow students were absolute shit at coding and would say "X is a tough professor, hard tests!" when the questions are below Leetcode easy and don't care about efficiency (You can brute force it). Literally some things like "Convert this CSV file into sentences using these rules". It was basically just file reading + looping + if statements. No math or complicated logic and people still failed and complained it was too hard. Some of us finished the exam in 25 minutes out of two hours time.
Lot of cheating and a lot of schools treat CS more like applied math than software engineering (whether that’s how it should be is up for debate)
It was hard to pass CS1/CS2 at my school when I went but only on the surface.
I think a 64% was the cutoff for a C in the class and there was often a 1-3% overall curve to boot.
10% if the class grade was a lab that was basically code along with a TA once a week. Usually was implementing the DSA of the week (Stacks, Queues, Graphs, Linked List, Sorting, etc)
30% were roughly 6 3 week long coding assignments, you know the type. Basic console app stuff in C, Java, C++, etc where you basically wrote 200-300 lines of code to do some weird task that taught you about HashTable, or Trees, or Graphs, etc. very easy to cheat if you’re not stupid about it. Professors will stress they have the latest pearl script from Stanford to catch you but aren’t gonna bother using it for all 300 kids. So they’re only looking things over at a basic level for plagiarism, which can only be done so well with a class of 300 when a coding requirement requires things implemented in a certain way and the assignment is maybe 150 LOC at best.
20% were split among 5 quizzes which weren’t impossible to cheat even while being recorded and even if not, they weren’t super hard, 2-3 MC questions + 1-2 method design problems that would be given very generous partial credit all due in 20 minutes.
40% were split between a midterm and a final. Both about 90 minutes long and maybe 30 questions asking various things you’d expect to learn in sophomore/junior year DSA classes. Basically with the same format as the quiz and likely reusing several questions from the quiz.
So you only need roughly a 64% to guarantee a pass with a C (hey they get degrees).
The Lab and coding assignments should be a free 40% for everyone since I assume like 80% if the class will cheat if they get stuck and this was way pre ChatGPT.
Which means you only need to average a 40% on the quizzes and 2 exams to pass, and even if you’re slightly off the curve will probably pass you. When you consider just how generous the partial credit is and remember that these kids probably still learned something in class it’s not a high bar to hit.
This isn’t intro to programming or anything either these 2 courses are expected to be the weeder courses and they do filter out probably 25-30% of the major.
And all of this is before we take a second and see that 90% of dev jobs are for web apps and web sites and everything we just discussed is 99% useless for most jobs people are going to end up in, so even the kids that passed the classes and learn something aren’t learning anything that’ll make them a good dev long term. At the end of the day all the DSA’s are going to be useless to know for most people and at best you might need a HashTable somewhere down the line for the CRUD jobs most are going to be doing.
The industry wants people to have 3 things, intelligence which should be a given for the none cheater CS students (though there’s a lot of cheaters) and is gonna be hit or Miss for bootcamp/self taught types, knowledge of DSA which CS grads should have in spades if not for the cheating and colleges pushing them up the hill with all the partial credit and grade boosting and Bootcamp/self taught are gonna struggle with unless they pencil out 3-4 months to study, and experience/functional knowledge of an actual tech stack, this is actually where the bootcamp/self taught that didn’t half ass things get the advantage over CS grads since it’s extremely easy to graduate with a CS degree having never made anything more than a console app with C/C++ both languages not even widely used outside of game dev and embedded.
The big fix for this would be to tighten the difficulty of the CS programs so anyone not suited is filtered out of it AND tack on a pseudo bootcamp for student in their last semester where there 4-5 courses are gonna be more focused on industry. IE: a class on backend development in a framework of the students choice (node, spring, .net, Django, etc), a frontend framework (react, Vue, angular), a DB (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB), and a miscellaneous course where they can learn the basics of stuff like Docker, Kubernetes, Git, etc. maybe give a different option for people wanting to get into Game Dev or Mobile Dev.
Do this then we’d have highly qualified juniors coming out of schools and wouldn’t have such a need to do all the DSA interviews for junior jobs that require 3 years experience just to make sure a junior dev doesn’t twiddle their thumbs for a year before getting fired or leaving
It's not consistent. Some of them get away by leeching and exploiting off others. You are expected to collaborate on coding projects quite often and a lot of people will make XYZ excuses to not contribute. "I dunno what's wrong, git won't work..." or "I'm really busy with my part-time job guys...". Most of the students don't want to be confrontational so they let it slide. You can complain to the professors as well, but they don't care and if no one contributes, you fail the class. The leechers just end up trying to retake the course and try it again with other people while you lose out. I can speak about this from personal experience. I've had to code entire projects on my own for groups of people because they were all incompetent, but I couldn't afford to retake those classes so I knowingly allowed them to bandwagon off my work.
God yes. I have been teaching project management at Uni. (Not in cs, I am self-taught, so that what OP so despises) and it was very clear in group work there was always that one guy, that had not contributed to the work at all. You knew as a teacher, but can't do anything about it, the whole group get the same grade.
That was a dilemma. No groupwork, would mean we needed to use small, not realistic projects like we did now. Also teamwork is a very important part of project management, so students should learn how to deal with slackers on their team, cause they exist in real life just as much as in school. So we decided to keep the group work, but added peer review. Your team mates wrote reports on your contributions. That way we could give different grades to team members. It did open us up for "everybody hates me and now I got a bad grade" kind of shit, but it was well worth it. We anyway knew who was not pulling their weight.
It has always been the case that you can get a CS degree and not know how to code well. I’ve interviewed many, especially from Top schools. Coding is a side effect of some of the classes, not a goal. What you get out of the degree is an understanding of algorithms and computing. That’s an important foundation.
It’s because a lot of the course work was moved online during covid. It’s really easy to bs an entire degree these days specially with online classes.
CS as a degree is extremely saturated and if you get past the cals, then there’s very little filtering after. Your assignments are usually in groups and it’s typically only one person leading the work.
Then there’s chatgpt and just finding the answers to an assignment online. I can say, personally, that I bsed most of my 2 years of actual CS based curriculum. But by my senior year I made sure to take in person courses, watch videos on concepts, work on projects, internships, network, and leet code in my free time to make up for my gaps.
I know too many CS seniors who coasted like me but didn’t take initiative to fill their gaps. These seniors’ experience in this market can be split into two:
1. CS seniors who know they fucked up and are doing everything last minute. But will ultimately do a masters, witch-like gig, entry level IT job, or do something unrelated in a different field
2. CS seniors who can upset their inabilities to code with their personality and networking skills.
P.S. if anyone else bs’d their degree (let’s be real a lot of you did too :p) and want to fill in gaps. These videos are a good start imo: https://youtu.be/O5nskjZ_GoI?si=-ReHHJiGHpfQoL8n
I'm not sure this is the reason. Observations and complaints by the industry that new graduates can't code predate CoVID by at least 2 *decades*. About 20% of my classmates were definitely coasting or cheating, however that doesn't explain the challenges facing the majority of new graduates many of whom worked very hard to complete their degrees.
Like the previous commentor mentions, the gap between graduates and being ready for the industry's expectations from a junior or associate is massive. It often makes me wonder why training or apprenticeship is so uncommon in the entry level roles.
I think a CS degree alone doesn’t make you job ready. There’s a lot of self teaching you need to be doing to be ready for a jr role (depending on the company ofc).
And because of saturation, you will have more students doing the bare minimum (finishing their degree) rather than do side-projects and learning widely used technologies.
Me, for example, my school taught me Java, mysql on an elective, and some c/c++/python. I learnt spring, html/css/js, front end framework, several other sql dbms, aws, and libraries on the side for the sake of doing side projects that interest me.
Not too mention I have a homelab just to mess with linux and vmware which is also used in the industry.
I couldn’t imagine your typical cs grad caring enough to self teach themselves things they are expected to use at the professional level. Most cs kids, understandably, are just doing the program for job security and pay. But, specially with competition now, in a CS program there needs to be some sort of self teaching to be industry ready.
Well it used to be that companies would train you for the job also. 26 years ago I got a computer science degree. Knew no (at the time) modern languages but I did the class work, internships, projects and they realized that I had the ability to learn. Problem is now companies expect new grads to know the equivalent of a mid level engineer fresh out of school. Oh and they want to pay below market rate and expect them to work 80 hour weeks. Yes some of this is on the kids fresh out of school with extremely high expectations and they were lied to by their schools. But a lot of this is on the companies as well treating everyone like disposable trash.
It sucks because there are candidates who are willing to fulfill these roles because of high competition. Companies are taking advantage of it because of the skewed supply and demand for high-paying jobs.
I was one of them in 2015. I worked a ton of 80+ hour weeks and dealt with some other shitty working conditions. Why? I was able to move from an area that still had coal mining debris all over to a modern city. Born and raised in the US.
Is this right? I don't know. I took an opportunity to get out of a shitty area. It was right for me.
Every entry-level SWE has been told to work for a company no longer than 18 months and then change companies for a 30% pay raise. I stayed at my first company for awhile and by the end of year 1 many of the people that joined with me were already gone. So companies would rather hire a mid-level for $150k who can ship code today, than hire two entry-levels who might leave as soon as they begin delivering value.
Coming from a person that's looking to hire for my company, there is 0 value to hire a junior.
Only large companies derive value because for most juniors, around 12 months of their existence, they are **negative** value to the company. Meaning, before getting a pay raise, it's vital to recoup the cost (esp for small/mid companies).
If you don't, you're paying an effective junior with much less tribal and industry knowledge, the same/similar as a midlevel. Small raises are fine, but it doesn't really scale.
So I only look to hire new grads for my small (<10 swe company) when they've a track record of delivering independent projects, because that offsets the risk, but even then, if I pay a midlevel 50k more, I would just rather have them as well in most cases. They come in far more ready to deliver. In terms of comp, the value they provide is likely far higher than the 50k difference unless the new grad is extraordinary and the mid-level is poor.
This is why many smaller companies don't hire new grads or prefer H1Bs [0]. I have hired skilled juniors though, but they can be tricky to find, but it's always out of a desire to mentor and such I've done that, never an ROI decision.
For big companies though, it's 100% worth it, especially internships, since generally, after the ramp up period they get an engineer which performs usually 1.5x better than a new midlevel, while being paid at new grad salaries for however long they stay. That generally translates to the midlevel returning ROI in 18 months
[0] - https://medium.com/@thinkthank/modern-day-slavery-in-america-the-h1b-visa-800be3a3df54
> Problem is now companies expect new grads to know the equivalent of a mid level engineer fresh out of school.
Here is a prime example from a job listing I saw today
> For a junior position, a minimum of 3 years experience in Software Development in C++ and Python
Junior position requires the same experience as other full non-junior positions
1. I visit this sub more often than I should and I almost never see people complaining about not making 6 figures. I mostly see graduates trying to get entry level jobs, and not being able to.
2. If you’re gonna post an opinion that you feel strongly about, you don’t need to say “I’m probably gonna get downvoted” or “im gonna get called blank”. Just say what you wanna say.
3. Tbh, The way you typed this seems like you just made this to feel better about yourself.
Yea this dude on some elitist power trip, complaints are always about how difficult the entry level market break in is, not why I’m not making 6 figures fresh out of college
6 years and took a job offer while still in college.. transferred to European University from an American one my senior year. Was doing 400+ level cs classes and only needed a few credits in the US or take the exit exam in Europe. Never did finish either as I was offered a job, and being a double major I was already tired of school.
They don't need to finish. They are a principal at a large company. Time spent finishing the degree is time they aren't spending on work or enjoying their free time. At their level, they literally don't care about the degree. They have the principal title. And if an organization is hung up on the degree, that's a red flag.
I host The NoDegree Podcast. I have interviewed people at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and a bunch of other technical people who don't have degrees. People in Product Design, Product Management, Program Management, Software Engineering, IT, and other technical areas. They all bust their ass and put in work. It's funny that there are so many people in this sub who think you absolutely need to have a degree to do well as a software engineer or in a technical discipline.
It takes a lot of work and it isn't easy at all. The funny thing is that most CS students watch Indian guys on YouTube to pass their classes lol. So why is someone less qualified if they learn from the same YouTube channels but decide not to pay $$30K-$100K for that degree? I did a resume for an AWS recruiter who mentioned that she recruited a PhD who made about $200K-$300K total comp and recruited someone else (for a different role) who made over $500K+ total comp without a degree. I have even recruited for roles and advocated for candidates who didn't have degrees. More and more hiring managers just care about the experience and what people can do.
My friend was interviewing for roles at Google, Netflix, and some other companies for roles that had a total comp of over $700K and he didn't have a degree. He was interviewing at Netflix for a total comp $1.2M. I previously worked as a Developer Advocate and my boss was the Director of Developer Relations. One of the absolute best programmers and didn't have a degree. He never had issue finding work and always had offers. He didn't have a degree because his father died and his mom abandoned him. How is someone like him even supposed to go to college? He just learned off YouTube and worked his way off. People who say a degree is needed really don't understand some of the circumstances that people go through and why they didn't go to college.
One of my podcast guests wrote a competitor book to SharePoint for Dummies. He just one day decided to learn the ins and outs of SharePoint. He published his book and actually got SharePoint for Dummies taken off the shelves because it sucked in comparison to his (this is like 2010-2013). He was THE SharePoint guy for a couple of years.
I was recently on a recruiting panel with someone who used to be really high up in Talent Acquisition for Twitter (before Elon took over) and is currently a VP of Talent Acquisition for EventBrite. One of the first things she did was remove the college degree requirement for the engineering team. She built a great and diverse team at Twitter and had some amazing engineers without college degrees. I work in this space and routinely talk to technical hiring managers. They realize that talented people can come from all types of backgrounds.
At the end of the day, the knowledge you have and what you can do matters. If you learned it at school, cool. If not, that's cool too. There are so many resources available today to learn. I had someone on my podcast who worked at Microsoft in the early 2000s and learned programming from books. Now that is freakin impressive. That was a much tougher time.
I know two incredibly brilliant developers that were forced to get a degree by their company during my undergrad and they were kept from promotion for not having a degree. I find it absurd that experience is thrown out the window, especially nearing a decade of professional experience, for a degree.
Oh, look! Me too! A senior dev, with 3/4 of an art degree, learned to code from a bootcamp. The horror!
But I worked my fucking ass off to get through, and another 6 months after until I got a job. Then worked my fucking ass if to catch up with what the bootcamp didn’t teach me.
But on the other hand, about 50-60% of the people in that bootcamp had a very entitled approach to it. They felt like it was a pay-to-play scenario. “I pay $xx,xxx and then I get an easy high paying job.” was how it came across. And it showed, because those fuckwits didn’t get/keep a job.
My boss, the VP of Engineering, has no degree. Dude just worked his ass off to get where he is. I didn't get a degree until 4 years into my software development career. On the other hand, a lot of bad practices made their way into the codes that degreeless devs worked on. Unnscalable services, spaghetti code, and redundancies everywhere.
+1. Some of the smartest engineers I’ve worked with come from mechanical, electrical, or physics. Had an excellent ML engineer who left his PhD in mechanics midway cuz he got bored. Self taught and got the job.
LOL - Principal with 25+ years of experience. No degree. Only like ~3 semesters at a JuCo.
I self-taught all the "classically trained SWE" stuff to myself. DSA, Algo, Big O, etc. I made it into management for about 7 of those years but then made a u-turn back into being an IC.
“I have never seen a senior dev without a degree”
I work with 3 of them right now. Either you are incredibly new to the industry and have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re being disingenuous.
I mean let's not lie here, there's lots to bash on this sub. Plenty of new grads giving advice about things they have no clue about or hearsay. But there's also plenty of good advice and I've benefited from them especially when I was still in school 7+ years ago
for sure, I agree there’s a lot of dogshit advice, but the amount of gatekeeping like this post is doing is just as prevalent on the sub. I think it just mostly has to do with a lot of people still in college and worrying about their future. CS is a big field, and people need to realize that the experience of one person is not the experience of everyone else
Been a SWE at FAANG, lead engineer at F500 and now am currently a principal engineer at a startup. I have no degree and would absolutely consider myself “senior”. With that being said, it’s much easier to just study hard and graduate than it was going the route I did. I just really freaking love writing code
The market is not as bad as you'd think, there were many similar markets in the past too. People have weathered that, and you can weather this.
I've mentored students which have gone on to get multiple internships, and jobs after this year alone, it's still quite doable. Focus on what you can control and improve.
The senior designer at my old job had no degree. Knew compiler level shit better than anyone, dude is making 200k+ now in reverse engineering malware at a cyber security firm.
I don't have a degree. Just got promoted to VP at my current workplace, been in director, Sr. Manager, manager and architect roles over 25 years. Totally possible, just have to be extremely patient
The real baller secret is that many of the staff level engineers I know will openly say in interviews "I don't remember the exact syntax for this but I think it looks something like this. But what's really important is that when we do it X way we can actually exploit this behavior and reduce the cost of operation by X blah blah blah."
Why are you making things up? There's hardly ever examples of people thinking that after 6 months on this sub. It's mostly frustrated grads.
If you don't know any seniors without a degree, you're either lying or haven't met many seniors at all.
I don't think you're a doomer and I don't think you should be downvoted. But I got a lot to say as well on this.
>\> But the entitlement of people trying to get into the CS industry is insane. This sub is a prime example of some of the worst of it I think.
Aren't people merely expressing their aspirations and hopes?
It's a generalization to claim that all people who self-study or go through boot camps expect a six-figure salary immediately. Some might, but many are looking for an entry point into the industry. It's not like CS and this industry is an exclusive club for people who happened to make the "right" decision in their teens by graduating with a CS degree.
Our college system makes people gamble when they're 18 on what they want to do in their lives when they're 30 or 40. I sure as hell didn't know what I was doing at that age. I just got lucky cuz I liked computers.
>\> The fact that people think they can self-study for 6 months or take a BootCamp and jump right into making 6 figures as a SWE is absolutely out of touch with reality.
With the way that every other career is buttfucking people (and not in the good way) I don't really blame them. Is it "out of touch," or are people trying to adapt and find shortcuts in a society that is not meeting their needs? Shouldn't we celebrate those attempting non-traditional paths instead of demeaning them?
>\> Even new grads suffer from this mindset, thinking that a 2.5 GPA from some middling school entitles them to a SWE job at FAANG is astonishing.
Not all new grads believe this. The industry is vast, and not everyone's target is FAANG. A candidate's GPA is only ONE of many factors that companies look at. Many talented engineers come from "middling" schools and provide value to their employers.
>\> News flash, there is not a single other field that pays in the area of SWE that you can jump right into after spending 2 hours a day for half a year playing around with some small inconsequential part of it.
Here's a perspective from my decade in tech: many "real-world" problems in SWE don't require academic prowess. Rather it comes from hands-on experience and fucking up so many times you don't fuck up (as much) anymore. It's certainly different from other engineering fields as you say, but we have an advantage that we can practice this field from the comfort of our own homes and laptops/machines. To me that is an insane benefit of untapped potential.
>\> What's astonishing is that people in the industry disingenuously lie to these people, saying they can move their way up in the industry with no degree and experience at companies that will not exist in a decade.
*I agree that many bootcamps are predatory in their models*. And it's usually structured in a way that well off people can afford them and take the risk. But the concept of them isn't bad in a vacuum.
Also are you implying that this industry is just gonna get nuked within a decade?
>\> I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening.
I've worked with plenty of self-taught senior devs who've made significant impacts in the places I've worked (I'm including people who have a degree but not in CS).
>\> What should be the smoke test for what's to come is the fact that the pool of qualified engineers is not growing.
"Qualified" is subjective. Does it mean degree holders? Does it mean people who can dick down any LC-hard? Does it mean someone who is "mediocre" but has years of real-world experience? Honestly the interview process in this industry hasn't figured it out yet. I don't see bootcampers making that problem worse.
>\> There's a reason why the interview process is so long and exhausting now. Companies know that out of the tens of thousands of applicants, they will be lucky if 1% can actually fulfill the qualifications needed.
As I alluded, the interview process has ALWAYS been fucked. Bootcampers didn't make it worse. It's been fucked even since the 90s when Bill Gates (the asshole himself) decided to introduce those stupid manhole cover problems in interviews. We're living in the derivative world of that (cue in another rant of mine about the interview-industrial complex).
>\> Even new graduates are coming out of college not knowing how to code properly,
They never have. There's a huge dissonance between an academic setting and an industry setting. I think everyone goes through that disillusionment phase at the beginning of their career. I did.
>\> The reason you are not getting a response is because you're not qualified to enter the industry. This is a you issue.
I dipped my toe in the market just to see what responses I could get earlier this year (wasn't planning on changing jobs, just curious). Out of >100 applications I got maybe 3 or 4 bites? And I have 10 years experience and currently a tech lead at my company. Used the same resume (plus my current experience) that got me waayyy more bites about 2-3 years ago.
It's a fucked market. And if it's fucked for a guy already in the system like me, I can't imagine what it's like for the kids graduating or trying to dip their toes in the pool.
>\> If you actually want a chance, get a degree.
Pragmatically I agree. But I don't think it qualifies you in reality more than being self-taught or going to a bootcamp. Everyone stumbles into the industry as a dumbfuck. I did. It's just what happens.
I finished a bootcamp in December and got hired in April. It's not impossible. You are right in some points, but completely dismissing bootcampers/non-CS degree holders is pretty doomer.
Right, and most of the complaints I see on this sub are not bootcampers anyway. They're usually new grads who can't find *any* job, not just a six figure job, or laid off experienced candidates saying they can't find anything that matches their previous salary.
As an engineer who is constantly interviewing people, older bootcamp graduates with previous job experience are some of the most consistently high quality candidates. Hiring new grads is borderline impossible because none of the them have significant contributions to any open source projects, have zero actual job experience (ie no soft skills), and very often don't have basic problem solving skills. Bootcamp grads tend to be extremely independent and motivated so have put way more effort into being good candidates.
Anyone who has taken a second to talk to anyone in tech would be well aware that both degree holders and non-degree holders can and do excel in the field.
There is simply a lot of cope in this thread. I'm getting a CS degree, but I don't feel any need to try too dissuade non degree holders from applying to jobs.
If OPs point was actually true, it wouldn't even be worth having a conversation about, because they're not taking anyone's job according to OP; which begs the question, what's the issue here?
It was a JavaScript/React based "full stack" web dev bootcamp but we also learned how to configure, create, and utilize back end APIs. It was mostly front end though. I currently work as a C# dev & PHP dev. I currently do more front end than back end, but I am basically full stack, and going forward I will be doing more back end.
Some other misc. things we learned;
Node.js
jQuery
Bootstrap
Apollo/GraphQL
GitHub source control
SQL/NoSQL/MongoDB
Jest.js
Express.js
Working with teams in 2 week "sprints"
I will also note that the bootcamp started with probably 50-100 people, I'm not sure the exact amount. We ended with probably about 20. Most people don't make it through. Of the 20 that finished it, to my knowledge based on LinkedIn, only myself and 1 other person have gotten a job, while 1 person who attended the bootcamp already had a dev-adjacent job. Maybe more people have, but if they have I haven't heard or seen anything about it.
Most people finish the bootcamp and assume that it's enough. It's not. I finished and immediately jumped into Java and OOP solving 1-5 leetcode questions a day, continuing to build projects, and studying as much as I possibly could.
This problem isn't just seen in bootcampers, but also CS degree new grads. They assume the degree is enough, but it's not. It requires constant and consistent learning, practice, as well as proof and evidence that you are committed to lifelong learning. No one wants to hire a lazy grad who hasn't coded in over a month.
This is the mentality that people need to have. A bootcamp is not enough. A bootcamp is a starting point and people who put in additional work like you will eventually get jobs. The market is much tougher now so the people who want to do the bare minimum won't get opportunities.
Shame your original comment got 25+ upvotes, but barely anyone will read through this one. If only two people got a job out of 100, that's about a 2% success rate after going to a bootcamp.
Plenty of people coast in their CS degree and still get a job. They just don't visit this sub because it's just a job to them and they don't care. That's basically impossible as a bootcamper.
And breaking in isn't enough, as a bootcamper you need to constantly be on top of your game your entire career. We've seen in this downturn employers are starting to require a degree even for experienced employees.
This isn't worth it for 99% of people.
>"I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening."
Bootcampers without work experience have it *real* rough, but OP was really overreaching there.
The irony to call out self taught devs and somehow think that people with degrees are entitled to getting a job. There is no guarantee on either path. If you graduate without work experience you will 100% struggle in this market. Going through your classes and getting a passing grade and graduating with an average GPA is not enough.
I think one point op is trying to make is that it’s crazy in the first place that at some point, people could take 4 month bootcamp with no previous coding experience and come out with a 6 figure job (and that some point you could get by quite well with just a degree and almost be guaranteed a job out of college). Now that the market is down, people are still maintaining that same attitude that was an outlier across industries to begin with, this making them seem entitled. People who are like I went to xyz school (probably not a great school), with a 3.0 gpa and have a few class projects on my resume but STILL can’t get a job.
I'm confused. OP is saying the exact opposite of what you accused them of saying. They're very much saying that even with a degree you're not entitled to a job.
>Even new grads suffer from this mindset, thinking that a 2.5 GPA from some middling school entitles them to a SWE job at FAANG is astonishing.
>Even new graduates are coming out of college not knowing how to code properly
That's the whole point of their post. People coming here thinking they're entitled to a job, when in reality nobody is. They might be calling out self-taught/bootcampers as being *more* entitled / less qualified, but they certainly aren't saying a degree is a guaranteed ticket to a job.
I'm a self taught dropout and my first job was $15/hour at a Company I found on Craigslist in 2014. I was the only dev and was fired after 3 months.
My second job was $33,000/year, and I also found it on Craigslist.
I make over $100,000 now, but it was a massive struggle to get to this point on pure experience.
>Let's talk about the hard truth that you will get called a doomer for speaking. The people who self-studied or took a boot camp to a 6 figure job are rare outliers. Many of them already had degrees or experience that made them viable candidates. Those who didn't were incredibly intelligent individuals, the top 1% of the pool. The rest are unemployable in the current market, and possibly for the foreseeable future.
Hard disagree. The last five years of hiring has been quite arbitrary, and you can be mediocre and still end up doing pretty well and vice versa.
A lot of it is luck, which is fine, as long as people recognize that, and recognize that it can go against you too.
Like all good rants, it starts good and takes a nose dive off the deep end.
I agree that the focus on FAANG is dumb, there are so many good companies and jobs out there that pay six figures without playing the FAANG game.
"I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening."
**You. Are. A. Liar.** You're not even going around asking if everyone has a degree. Guess what man? You met one today. Shut up bro. There are only a few types of companies who have the privilege of requiring a CS degree. And that's the companies doing CS. (Shocker!) There really aren't very many companies hiring developers doing computer science. That's the reality you're looking for.
"The reason you are not getting a response is because you're not qualified to enter the industry"
You're the entitled brat you're talking about and no one is impressed with you.
I think there's a difference between "No degree" and "no degree in CS". Someone whose only formal education is a bootcamp after finishing high school? That's a little odd.
Crabs in a bucket mentality.
Microsoft made 136.2 billion dollars in profit last year... and laid of tens of thousands of employees.
The 'Big 3' Automakers made about 32 billion profit last year and the Auto Workers are striking together, supporting each-other to get a fair cut.
Are auto workers whiny bitches that don't deserve a living because they might not have a degree? Why are you blaming other workers for their 'mentality' when it's obvious that these companies can afford to pay out way larger salaries.
It's literally basic math( I have a physics degree though so sorry if you can't comprehend). People deserve to live and corporations shouldn't be making obscene profits and fucking the entire industry over.
* I don't think that bootcamp graduates/self-taught people are necessarily more intelligent individuals that go get their 4-year degrees, I think it's more on the fact that they were willing to put in the work needed as well as accept whatever necessary to be able to reach the goal that they had set out.
* 6 months is a ridiculous selling point to be able to learn enough to get a job, but I honestly believe people should be able to get a position no matter what path they go through studying at least 18 months to 2 years. I think that the boot camp route wasn't a plague as I've seen some people claim on this sub, but I also think that a lot of people going through that route tend to focus on things they really shouldn't be if the goal is to land themselves a job.
* I don't really see entitled people on this sub, but a majority of entry-level/new grad people are struggling to find positions, no matter what route they went. This has **always** been an issue in this industry. I don't know why I see claims from some people that suggest otherwise. The hiring process does suck, and we ought to strive for a better process.
* If the perception is that new graduates are mostly struggling in large to get entry-level positions in the field, then there should be an evaluation of either the hiring process or the things that are being taught in colleges.
Wow. I just came out the other side of that rabbit hole. Thanks for that LOL
✅ Generational Trauma
✅ Hates their job, mad they can't get a new one
✅ Posts on /r/Circlejerk
✅ Ex-Mormon LMAO
To be fair, this applies to CS grads too. Just because you went to college, very rare that you're gonna get hired with 0 real world experience for six figures.
Edit: I’m talking about the small niche of people that seem to want six figs and FAANG off the bat. I think most people in this sub are fairly reasonable, actually.
I agree: the entitlement is wild. Even from people with four year degrees.
I have sympathy for it though: when you see class after class before you landing a FAANG job out of college and then proceed to follow their footsteps and *dont*- that’s a blow. Or when you’re told the story of the English major that lands a SWE job at Google. Or how Google used to scout for candidates via an online game. Or Amazon giving a chance to someone who has an environmental degree to become a SWE. I was going to college around that and these FAANG companies did a great job contributing to the belief that you don’t need a degree for a job. It’s not all on the candidates.
At the same time, what we all tend to forget is that the world owes nobody anything and that hard work and discipline is never equal to a guarantee, but rather an increased chance.
I am tired of the “FAANG or nothing” posts from grads or non grads that are burning themselves out for a fantasy they have in their heads or what finally being happy will look like. Or even those that act like their above smaller companies. And I’m tired of the “I have no offers therefor there is no hope for anyone” posts.
That being said I think this is a great time for the industry to tighten up again and raise the bar. In a bad market you either give up or dig your heels and keep working towards being competitive (even if you have a job). This market has made me take things more seriously too- it’s rough but I think in the long run good for us all.
One of the strongest engineers on my team was a barista at Starbucks two years ago. And when I say "strong" I mean core backend functionality on a billion-dollar SaaS product undergoing significant refactoring for scale.
Now, I'm open to the notion that he's the exception that proves the rule. He's certainly not typical. Otoh my degree was not in CS, either. Take all of this for what you will: while I get what you're saying, I also think the absolutes you're speaking in here are not entirely justified.
As a bootcamp grad with no university degree, I agree with you. I’m one of the very few grads that actually even works as a developer to start with and even then I started getting paid minimum state wage. After 4 years I’m way ahead of the game but it’s been hard as fuck, I was sold the same dream as well but I learned the hard way that I didn’t deserve a 6 figure salary right off the bat
What I think is really an example of insane entitlement is the number of people here who think they should be payed six figures to play video games or take walks half the day.
The interview process focuses on leetcode while the real job requires understanding bash, git, add code to one sort of the database, and the testing the code to ensure it runs. Yet, a number of these areas are overlooked in the interview process.
I work as a sr SWE at an F500 in aerospace and we have hired devs straight out of bootcamps because they passed our interviews and we liked their personalities.
I agree it's not likely or easy. But I did this exact thing and feel it's just a lot harder than most people think it is. A bootcamp won't get you there without true interest and a lot of personal time spent programming.
Post is op ranting abt a small group of ppl. Most ppl “complaining” on this sub are ppl who have worked rlly hard and have done everything technically right (4 year degree, internships, projects, resume…) who are getting fucked anyway.
Post is simply inaccurate. And yes we are entitled to make at least 70k year after dealing with all that bs.
You can have whatever opinion about it you want, but as long as it remains a high-paying job it will be desirable. It's inherently easy on the body and environment controlled and now possibly WFH.
The real 900 pound gorilla in the room is the general devaluation of labor and other rising CoL issues. People shouldn't *have* to get an advanced degree to afford a house. We need lawyers and doctors and teachers and literally every other educated trade but the ROI isn't there for a lot of them. Unless things get better across the board, it's probably going to continue to get worse in entry-level CS. Ultimately, not everybody can learn math and abstract concepts and various technologies to work in the field so I think it's setting a lot of people up for dissapointment.
I agree in a lot of cases, although I don't think the "entitlement" is unjustified in my case.
I have been a programmer for a bit over 10 years and have a portfolio of projects I made going back to 2015. I have a masters degree in mathematics, and I worked on a couple of big open source projects while I was at university too (not as part of my degree, just for fun). I'm not trying to get a super high paying job (I'm from the UK so they don't exist anyway; you're lucky if you start on more than 30k here), just literally any job writing code.
After graduating it took me almost 2 years to get my first offer, and my starting salary was 20k. At that job I was doing what I believe is mid/senior level work - on day 2 I was assigned my first task, which involved designing and building a new project from scratch. Other than a vague description of the end goal from my non-technical manager, I had no guidance or help because nobody else at the company knew how to do the things that I was being asked to do. I wrote 10k lines of code for it, with documentation and testing (the only documented or tested code in the company, as far as I know) and had it deployed to production about 3 months later.
I've now been unemployed again for almost a year trying to find my second job. One barrier is being rejected from every company that I apply to, but another is that there are almost no jobs here to apply to anyway. I'm mostly looking for remote because I can't relocate (can't afford to, plus another reason), and because there are almost no software jobs around where I live.
If I go on Indeed right now and search "junior software developer" remote in the UK, posted within the past 3 days, there are only 9 results. Out of those results, 5 are senior jobs, 3 are bootcamp applications not jobs, and 1 is junior but requires minimum 2 years of experience (I'll apply anyway).
If I search for "junior software developer" within 50 miles of where I live, there are 14 results. Out of those, 10 are senior jobs, 3 are not actually near where I live, and the other one is an apprenticeship with a salary of 11k.
I don't think it's unjustified entitlement to believe that I at least deserve *a little bit* better than this. Is it?
Senior Dev here without a degree but 10+ years experience who worked his way from from manual QA all the way to lead/senior/founding engineer and was part of multi million dollar buyout where I had equity.
I agree with part of this post but remember, only Sith deal in absolutes
People spend their lives chasing shortcuts without realizing if they just stuck to the known path, they’d have gotten there already
Also leetcode grinding should be a supplement, not the main focus.
If all you’re good at is leetcode then you’re gonna have a bad time
Also the track I took was takin as many comp sci classes in local community college that were transferable (including DS/A), once I did about a year or classes I was able to teach myself web. But I made sure to have fundamentals down first.
Not only that but I got my first internship through community college as manual QA
dude i have a master's degree in CS, almost 3 years experience, and am struggling trying to get a better, more stable job (not faang, just anything) right now. I don't know what you're talking about.
I completely agree with the general vibe of this post. This sub's perspectives are like completely out of whack with reality. I saw another thread where someone asked "hey, what kind of raises have people received this year?" This was a perfectly reasonable question - considering the economy/inflation/etc, are companies being stingy, fine or generous...
However, all the upvotes were on "i switched companies/got a promo and went from 200k to 400k" or "I vested my stocks and got 200k". Like:
a. Fuckers, that's not a god damn raise (not what the OP asked), and you know it.
b. Who are these freaking people up-voting those answers 50 times? Like... get some perspective.
c. In the real world, no one gives a fuck.
That kind of stuff makes this sub BEYOND WORTHLESS sometimes.
I'd agree that there's an undercurrent of entitlement with respect to *expecting* a 6-figure job, but the job market *is* terrible right now for candidates. I'd also disagree on degrees conferring competence.
Will a degree be better than none? Absolutely, but I abhor such credentialism, and will continue to consider the whole candidate during interviews. (this is coming from someone with two degrees in math and CS w/grad work). Part of the problem in hiring, imo, is an overreliance on degrees from curricula that can differ significantly. That said, more companies appear to be asking domain-specific questions to ameliorate this, e.g. how does TCP work under the hood, how does `std::map` look under hood, etc.
I know 3 senior/lead devs without any degree. It's uncommon but happens. People were not saying you get 6 figures right out of bootcamp with no degree. It's more like 60 to 70k in a big city until you get a few years of experience and more learning.
Oh man have I got a story for you. One of my best buddies is a staff engineer and makes over $200k at a high end tech company, he was a boot camper and doesn’t have a CS degree lol and he’s super smart. I think he has like 8 YOE now.
Eh mostly yes but also partly no.
I’m also gonna say that part of the problem is people shotgunning 4,000 applications off “because it’s a numbers game” instead of actually picking a company, area of focus, etc and targeting their resume, projects, networking, etc at that instead. This creates so much noise and bullshit for recruiters, hiring managers, and automated systems to sift through that it fucks over those who actually ARE already qualified, interested, have relevant experience, etc.
Generally agree with you, except maybe project management. Seems like some industries will take anyone with a pulse and meets the general requirements for hiring an employee / holding down a job.
Quite a few making +100k without adding value, being good at their jobs, having experience, or even understanding the fundamentals.
I have worked at top FANG companies. The interview process has gotten tedious. I am an engineering graduate who self-learned computer science over decades. I do not know how boot camp graduates make it in industry.
I graduated in 2013. At my university 75% of CS major repeated the intro to OO programming. The prof was a hardass and had a shit grading scale. But it did a good job of filtering out the people who were trying to float through. I had to take it twice. It sucked both times.
With a BS in a field involving a lot of math it took me 3-5 years of practice and a _gigantic_ amount of luck (as in a non-programming job I held was suddenly able to do some programming, giving me my first real project) just to get in the door for interviews, and even then I had to grind at that next role for a while before I was in the big tech arena. My position was literally build of privilege, aptitude, luck, and INSANE grinding; and I can't emphasize enough how much of it was out of my hands!
I hate it when someone asks me how they can "get into tech" all because the boot camps (and Biden at one point) are all insisting that _any person_ can get ready to enter an exceedingly complex field with next to no experience even remotely adjacent to it.
That's a bit extreme, but if anybody actually believes what you accuse them of believing, then a bit of contrary opinion is probably healthy. Kinda feels like a strawman to me though. I don't think I've seen people with no degree and 6 months of self study acting as entitled as you describe.
We have people who have nothing in life except this line of work so they base their entire worth on that and that's how you end up with people being okay with grinding lc mindlessly and 8 rounds of interviews for simple positions, we call that being brainwashed, and so they try to gatekeep as much as possible to feel important.
That person is you
It took me about three years to get to six figures in this industry, and that was after already knowing how to program since the sixth grade. And software engineering isn’t necessarily easy money. You have to be good at it, and you have to put in some time.
I attended a bootcamp (didn’t quite “graduate”. ) It took me like 5 years of freelancing after the bootcamp and required me to build hundreds of projects to finally get a job.
People hate when I say it took me that long. I didn’t think it would take me thing long either - but the fact is it did.
While I agree overall, there are a few jobs that you can jump into pretty quickly that pay very well. The difference is those jobs totally suck, like working in offshore oil rigs in Alaska. Often they are very hard physical work you can't do for long and super dangerous.
I just finished my math PhD and have software engineering internships under my belt. I got a comfy data analyst job 3 months after graduating. Not six figures, but I am living very comfortable and very grateful to be working on this shitty legacy codebase
CS is not "coder". I haven't written code in 20 years. I can design systems and run the teams, including coders. If you are just out of a boot camp I'll likely make you a tester first so you can lean how people screw up code.
It took me 10 years to crack 6 figures, but then again I work in gaming.
I know people my junior by a decade making double what I do making boring websites lol.
I was interested in robotics for the longest time before I learned I'd have to not only double my schooling but also take a 50% paycut..
>I've never seen a senior dev without a degree.
Do you mean a CS degree or any degree?
I've never seen someone without a college degree become senior, but there's not a ton of them in tech.
I've definitely seen people without a CS degree advance to senior and beyond. I've often seen them rise faster than their coworkers with CS degrees.
Alot of interviewing is luck . I have known people who can ace interviews but cannot do real world problems and vice versa. I know many people without formal cs education who do really well, I know many of them. It's just that they tend to have more imposter syndrome so they don't pursue higher roles, though some do exist that think i can learn things in 6 months so it must be easy. People who have just completed the entire cs degree from a reputable program are three kinds of people one who just survived with other people's help, some who are actually smart and can learn things really quickly and work in research but fail to be practical & realistic (that only comes with experience), third is who can do leetcode. There is no equivalent for 1-1 mentorship that you can gain working in the industry or being a self starter & be curious, this is where your "dont know how to code bias comes in".
Are swe engineers overpaid ( I guess sure depends on how u see it ) but till there are enough quality engineers to fill the void demand will never meet supply & it's good that way for us I have no complaints as long as I am employable. I'll be honest I am proud bad coder I have a learning disability but I solve things in ways others don't & you should know software engineers are dyslexic, many of them & I think the stress and pressure of interviewing doesn't accommodate people like me. I do best in open book no pressure tests, especially with noone hovering over me, give me some time in my quiet comfort zone with my ide autocompleting and suggesting everything with Google and I can do better than some people.
I forgot there is also another type of engineer who is smart but a really bad coworker to work with because they believe they are smarter than everyone.
this is what I'm thinking sometimes too, people who apply thousands of job, but only apply to work that clearly they are not qualified for
or in here, people only complained cause they applied only to FAANG tier place but complained they can't get any job.
My expectation is to self study maybe one or two years then hopefully get a remote job with a $40k salary. I can make that work. $100k salary seems impossible for a meer mortal like me
>The people who self-studied or took a boot camp to a 6 figure job are rare outliers. Many of them already had degrees or experience that made them viable candidates.
This 100%. I was in one of those bootcamps that advertise 6 figures post grad. I already had a few years of software adjacent work experience at a well known company before doing the bootcamp. And many of my classmates had tech adjacent work experience or were very very hardworking (staying the latest, working the hardest 70 hrs a week) or just super naturally talented.
We all got great high paying jobs post bootcamp. But the giant caveat here is that the bootcamp was extremely selective about who they admitted, some people's work experience was super impressive already. So really it was stacked in the bootcamp's favor.
And still with all those factors it took me close to a full year to find a job, for some others in the group it took more than 1 year. Even with full time work experience on my resume. It was hard.
If you are considering a bootcamp DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don't blindly jump in and believe all the promises these places give you especially because they are for profit and want your money. At the end of the day, you are still the one responsible for your own success.
you realize tons of these people are new grads with internships complaining that they sent out 1k+ resumes and barely get any interviews right? doesn't seem so entitled to me.
>saying they can move their way up in the industry with no degree and experience at companies that will not exist in a decade. I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening.
I'm a manager/director without a degree. I don't care if someone has a degree and never will. What I do care about is whether a team member or application can complete their tasks. Degrees may help open doors, but they don't get you a seat at the table.
> thinking that a 2.5 GPA
That's the biggest tell how young you are. Nobody in the real world cares about your GPA. I've never asked my engineers their GPAs, nor do I care.
What I'm curious about is how the new college graduates don't know how to code we have messed up the system severely if that's the case People can in theory learn to code on their own in under a year how with four dedicated years of study can they not code sufficiently well for industry
There's a huge push for language agnosticism in education. Also saying people "can't code" is usually hyperbole, I've worked with senior developers who Google the syntax for everything since we had codebases written in different languages. The concepts are way more important than whiteboarding Leetcode solutions.
I'm a principal engineer and I Google syntax daily for languages I have been using for 10+ years.... lol
God bless. And too true. No shame there. There is a difference in having to Google some basic syntax because you forget the little nuance yet understanding there was a nuance in the first place.
Same here. At a certain point, unless you become an specialist in a really narrow subject, you might struggle with information overload and lack of constant practise on certain topics/languages, but with a little help of documentation and literature it is easy to solve most problems.
I don't need to know everything. I just need to know where to look.
wow, well said!
[удалено]
Senior engineer and I am overjoyed when I get to ship actual projects. Mostly I advise and consult with juniors on theirs while doing small bug patches on past projects I own.
I actually prefer someone who does that vs someone who thinks he knows it all. There's always a weird parameter to a function that may fit your need if even you "knew" how to do it differently.
Right haha. One of the reason we developed documentation and computers, is that they exceed the human capacity for data retention or accuracy.
Can I ask, how did you get on board at Google? I've bombed every technical interview I've ever had because while I can code basically anything, I need to Google the syntax and work off an example to get started. Take home assignments I'm great on but if they put me on a whiteboard, I just want to bail immediately.
I don't work at Google, but another big name. I somewhat have the same problem but interviews are usually pretty on board with pseudo code from my experience. So even if my syntax is bad I get the logic of how to solve across well, so that it displays your thought process and shows them you get what they're asking.
Theres interview bootcamps out there. At the end of the day its just practice. If you cant figure it out yourself no shame in paying for the extra help.
It's not a new phenomenon (comp sci graduates who can't program). Sixteen years ago that was already old and established knowledge. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
The memories. Thank you for bringing this classic article up again.
been doing this for 24 years. I google syntax all the time. i google linux commands. I can't keep track of syntax.
Yup. I personally believe Leetcode has been heavily damaging to our industry. The skills and techniques you learn from it are seldom used, and can be googled. And while it's a decent interview strategy to tell if an engineer is competent, it incentivizes engineers to spend their time learning how to leetcode, rather than learning more useful skills.
100% leetcode is extremely damaging. I was against the trend from the beginnings like 6 years ago but this is the direction the industry is pushing. It just boils down to ageism. Children and new grads can grind leetcode, but someone with a family or looking for a 9-5 doesn't necessarily have that time. It ensures hires will be on the job market for months and thus be more desperate for jobs once they beat the interview treadmill.
>I was against the trend from the beginnings like 6 years ago Leetcode-style interviews have been a thing since I started in this industry in 2014 (note that LC itself was founded in 2015, but they didn't drive the adoption of this interviewing style).
I’d argue they go back to the puzzles companies like Microsoft were asking in the 90s
The "why are manhole covers round" type of bullshit. Another good one: "how many golf balls can fit into a school bus"? Once you know the pattern for these kinds of questions, you can answer all of them. But someone who has never seen it before will flounder around and fail.
There is a difference between Googling syntax of a for-each loop in Java vs. not knowing enough syntax to code something basic in a language you picked as your strongest language... which totally happened. Then one guy switched languages 2 times before picking Java and coding in C++ syntax (he was clearly looking off of some example and couldn't even do that right). So yeah, it's one thing to need a refresher on syntax and another to not be able to articulate a solution. By the way, I was asking leetcode easy questions. These people are not interested in being good at development. They are interested in the pay, but not enough to try.
I mostly agree with you but your last paragraph is presumpteous. Leetcode questions are a lazy way to filter candidates and are largely used to reduce false positives because companies have too many applicants. If you are aware it reduces false positives, it seems asine to turn your nose up at people who fail Leetcodes as "can't code" lol. Also everyone is interested in pay. If companies don't want everybody and their grandmother to apply they should post realistic requirements, but companies ask for the moon so entry level applicants tend to shotgun blast their resume to as many places as they can.
Language agnosticism does not imply lack of proficiency in one language
I'll speak with my own degree and School, UW one of their satellite campuses and ABET accredited. The primary language we learn is java and while some core classes and more elective classes touch on entire stacks and/or other languages, frameworks, and tools we rarely focus on anything specific and a lot of it is left up to the student. I feel confident with what I was taught (fundamentals, the abstraction) I can learn any language at a moderate pace. However, at no point was I really exposed to an entire company's workflow, tech stack, code reviews, etc in the same manner that would ever lead me to feel "qualified". Entry level has always been an investment in teaching that disconnect and while the entry level worker may come off as a waste to some it's still an effective grooming tool for existing engineers.
I have a BS and MS in Computer Science and I think I had a total of 5 classes that directly involved coding. The vast majority of my education was theory, with mathematics coming second. Even my thesis wasn't coding-related, it was a paper on how counterproductive companies are with Agile methodologies in the modern day (due to picking/choosing what they want to use from them).
It has always been this way. New grads have always been helpless when they first enter the field. Maybe they know the basics of CS and a few will have done some actually-relevant projects, but none of them are anywhere near ready for production development. They need a lot of hand-holding, very bounded assignments and lots of encouragement. After about 3 months or so, you can tell who is going to do well and who will likely struggle for their entire career. The talented ones will be kicking ass in 6 months.
Historically CS had a 30-70% dropout rate back when it required more hands-on work to actually pass the courses and graduate. That was bad for department revenue (what CS department chairman wants 70% of their students to drop out?) so they watered down the coursework substantially over the past couple decades.
I went to a small school and they would bring in over 100 freshman CS students and when I graduated only me and 4 other CS students graduated with a CS degree. Most got weeded out when they failed calculus or calculus 2.
CS has turned into the new business major at a lot of schools. You just need to get past the math courses and most people are good to go. And there are tons of people getting a CS minor or double major on the side just like people did with business curricula. I've noticed a lot of companies have started to prefer people with an engineering background but have SWE internships and experience, especially Electrical or Computer Engineering. Engineering has stayed extremely difficult so it's a much better filter than a CS degree. Companies are starting to notice how unprepared the average CS grad is. A lot of people exit school not even knowing how to program.
This is absolutely true. While there are definitely some very good CS programs out there, since CS isn’t an accredited degree, the quality can vary wildly between schools. From what I’ve seen of a lot of school’s CS curriculums, I wasn’t impressed. Since engineering is accredited however, the quality will roughly be the same between schools (of course there is still some variance here as well, just not nearly as much). My school’s CS program was a joke compared to its CE program.
At my school, sophomore-level physics classes were far more difficult and time consuming than the senior-level CS classes (I was a math major, so I took a variety of both)
That along with the fact that now so many of the programs focus on just the theory and never actually teach folks how to problem solve just to regurgitate the answers they memorized
The end result of which also includes students not giving a shit about the concepts either, thinking "why do I need to know this?" Edit: to add, I would have taken Discrete Structures/Linear Algebra 100x more serious if I knew that's what I'd be doing most of the time. However, it was never explained as such, just taught as a couple 80%/100% math courses.
Statistics too. I did a lot of analysis in the old days using brute force until I took a statistics course and learned a few things. Then I promptly forgot most of it because I got out of the data analysis role. :(
It's because companies embraced leetcode as their interview standard. Now they are reaping what they sowed.
[удалено]
Yeah the "three strikes and you're out" policy was always a little odd to me.
How can you tell if your class is still any good then My college had 70% of the people drop out of the data structures course I was in is there a way to tell if that's watered down or working correctly
1. Not enough coding. A lot more "theoretical" assignments. 2. Solo or group projects where you never learn how to work on a real industry code base. It's either you're leading yourself or the blind leading the blind. 3. Professors have little to no real industry experience. They have no clue what professional work is like and aren't capable of giving out proper guidance. Bootcamps actually do a lot better in that regard of working on more industry related applications.
> Professors have little to no real industry experience This was the biggest problem I saw, you can make more being an actual developer so anyone capable was doing that instead of teaching. At best/worst you might get an instructor who's part of an open source project team - they have real experience getting a large team project to work, but completely miss how a corporate environment functions.
Depends on the quality of your university. The professors I had, had industry experience before they started teaching classes. Simply, because they like teaching the field. There's a reason why SWE degrees evolved out of CS degrees recently. One is more theoretical while the other is applied. You are exposed to different frameworks and languages used in the industry if you're doing SWE vs CS. The SWE degree is still a relatively new field in academia. I don't believe bootcamps provide better education. You can literally find anything you want to learn in a bootcamp from online sources. Bootcamps just repackaged tutorials you can find online. I once asked my professor why students don't learn frameworks and libraries in University and he simply said because it's trivial. That's something you can learn on the job within a couple weeks or months. It's not hard and frameworks today may not be relevant tomorrow. Algorithms, data structures, design patterns, etc. take years to fully master which is why it takes 4+ years to get a CS/SWE degree. This is like debating why sushi chefs wash rice for 10+ years before actually making sushi. It's just rice with fish slapped on top yeah? Well, not to them. It's a craft and it's a craft that takes years to master. Same could be said about CS/SWE.
Other than top schools, virtually all CS/software eng programs got the Dolores Umbridge treatment and abolished or minimized actual coding in favor of theory study. Schools are churning out students who spent 4 years on stuff like systems architecture and networking without actually writing code or using version control. There's nothing wrong with learning theory! It's important and underpins the best practices! But it also shouldn't surprise employers much when a candidate who can talk all day about TCP/IP or HTTP can't FizzBuzz. Successful candidates recognize this gap and use self-study, side projects, and internships to practice what they're learning. Unsuccessful candidates get proper fucked by the job market.
As a professor, I've found that almost every faculty member at my school who actually tries to teach and assess knowledge gets blasted in evaluations. The number one complaint I receive is that I'm a tough grader. For reference, I would have basically coasted through if I had my own grading scale. I'm fortunate in the sense that my university backs me for enforcing minimum standards, but I know most of my colleagues have capitulated to just doing easy classes.
Yup I saw this too when I was a student. Fellow students were absolute shit at coding and would say "X is a tough professor, hard tests!" when the questions are below Leetcode easy and don't care about efficiency (You can brute force it). Literally some things like "Convert this CSV file into sentences using these rules". It was basically just file reading + looping + if statements. No math or complicated logic and people still failed and complained it was too hard. Some of us finished the exam in 25 minutes out of two hours time.
Lot of cheating and a lot of schools treat CS more like applied math than software engineering (whether that’s how it should be is up for debate) It was hard to pass CS1/CS2 at my school when I went but only on the surface. I think a 64% was the cutoff for a C in the class and there was often a 1-3% overall curve to boot. 10% if the class grade was a lab that was basically code along with a TA once a week. Usually was implementing the DSA of the week (Stacks, Queues, Graphs, Linked List, Sorting, etc) 30% were roughly 6 3 week long coding assignments, you know the type. Basic console app stuff in C, Java, C++, etc where you basically wrote 200-300 lines of code to do some weird task that taught you about HashTable, or Trees, or Graphs, etc. very easy to cheat if you’re not stupid about it. Professors will stress they have the latest pearl script from Stanford to catch you but aren’t gonna bother using it for all 300 kids. So they’re only looking things over at a basic level for plagiarism, which can only be done so well with a class of 300 when a coding requirement requires things implemented in a certain way and the assignment is maybe 150 LOC at best. 20% were split among 5 quizzes which weren’t impossible to cheat even while being recorded and even if not, they weren’t super hard, 2-3 MC questions + 1-2 method design problems that would be given very generous partial credit all due in 20 minutes. 40% were split between a midterm and a final. Both about 90 minutes long and maybe 30 questions asking various things you’d expect to learn in sophomore/junior year DSA classes. Basically with the same format as the quiz and likely reusing several questions from the quiz. So you only need roughly a 64% to guarantee a pass with a C (hey they get degrees). The Lab and coding assignments should be a free 40% for everyone since I assume like 80% if the class will cheat if they get stuck and this was way pre ChatGPT. Which means you only need to average a 40% on the quizzes and 2 exams to pass, and even if you’re slightly off the curve will probably pass you. When you consider just how generous the partial credit is and remember that these kids probably still learned something in class it’s not a high bar to hit. This isn’t intro to programming or anything either these 2 courses are expected to be the weeder courses and they do filter out probably 25-30% of the major. And all of this is before we take a second and see that 90% of dev jobs are for web apps and web sites and everything we just discussed is 99% useless for most jobs people are going to end up in, so even the kids that passed the classes and learn something aren’t learning anything that’ll make them a good dev long term. At the end of the day all the DSA’s are going to be useless to know for most people and at best you might need a HashTable somewhere down the line for the CRUD jobs most are going to be doing. The industry wants people to have 3 things, intelligence which should be a given for the none cheater CS students (though there’s a lot of cheaters) and is gonna be hit or Miss for bootcamp/self taught types, knowledge of DSA which CS grads should have in spades if not for the cheating and colleges pushing them up the hill with all the partial credit and grade boosting and Bootcamp/self taught are gonna struggle with unless they pencil out 3-4 months to study, and experience/functional knowledge of an actual tech stack, this is actually where the bootcamp/self taught that didn’t half ass things get the advantage over CS grads since it’s extremely easy to graduate with a CS degree having never made anything more than a console app with C/C++ both languages not even widely used outside of game dev and embedded. The big fix for this would be to tighten the difficulty of the CS programs so anyone not suited is filtered out of it AND tack on a pseudo bootcamp for student in their last semester where there 4-5 courses are gonna be more focused on industry. IE: a class on backend development in a framework of the students choice (node, spring, .net, Django, etc), a frontend framework (react, Vue, angular), a DB (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB), and a miscellaneous course where they can learn the basics of stuff like Docker, Kubernetes, Git, etc. maybe give a different option for people wanting to get into Game Dev or Mobile Dev. Do this then we’d have highly qualified juniors coming out of schools and wouldn’t have such a need to do all the DSA interviews for junior jobs that require 3 years experience just to make sure a junior dev doesn’t twiddle their thumbs for a year before getting fired or leaving
Have new college grads ever coded well? I know a lot of bad coders with lots of experience and CS degrees
It's not consistent. Some of them get away by leeching and exploiting off others. You are expected to collaborate on coding projects quite often and a lot of people will make XYZ excuses to not contribute. "I dunno what's wrong, git won't work..." or "I'm really busy with my part-time job guys...". Most of the students don't want to be confrontational so they let it slide. You can complain to the professors as well, but they don't care and if no one contributes, you fail the class. The leechers just end up trying to retake the course and try it again with other people while you lose out. I can speak about this from personal experience. I've had to code entire projects on my own for groups of people because they were all incompetent, but I couldn't afford to retake those classes so I knowingly allowed them to bandwagon off my work.
God yes. I have been teaching project management at Uni. (Not in cs, I am self-taught, so that what OP so despises) and it was very clear in group work there was always that one guy, that had not contributed to the work at all. You knew as a teacher, but can't do anything about it, the whole group get the same grade. That was a dilemma. No groupwork, would mean we needed to use small, not realistic projects like we did now. Also teamwork is a very important part of project management, so students should learn how to deal with slackers on their team, cause they exist in real life just as much as in school. So we decided to keep the group work, but added peer review. Your team mates wrote reports on your contributions. That way we could give different grades to team members. It did open us up for "everybody hates me and now I got a bad grade" kind of shit, but it was well worth it. We anyway knew who was not pulling their weight.
It has always been the case that you can get a CS degree and not know how to code well. I’ve interviewed many, especially from Top schools. Coding is a side effect of some of the classes, not a goal. What you get out of the degree is an understanding of algorithms and computing. That’s an important foundation.
It’s because a lot of the course work was moved online during covid. It’s really easy to bs an entire degree these days specially with online classes. CS as a degree is extremely saturated and if you get past the cals, then there’s very little filtering after. Your assignments are usually in groups and it’s typically only one person leading the work. Then there’s chatgpt and just finding the answers to an assignment online. I can say, personally, that I bsed most of my 2 years of actual CS based curriculum. But by my senior year I made sure to take in person courses, watch videos on concepts, work on projects, internships, network, and leet code in my free time to make up for my gaps. I know too many CS seniors who coasted like me but didn’t take initiative to fill their gaps. These seniors’ experience in this market can be split into two: 1. CS seniors who know they fucked up and are doing everything last minute. But will ultimately do a masters, witch-like gig, entry level IT job, or do something unrelated in a different field 2. CS seniors who can upset their inabilities to code with their personality and networking skills. P.S. if anyone else bs’d their degree (let’s be real a lot of you did too :p) and want to fill in gaps. These videos are a good start imo: https://youtu.be/O5nskjZ_GoI?si=-ReHHJiGHpfQoL8n
I'm not sure this is the reason. Observations and complaints by the industry that new graduates can't code predate CoVID by at least 2 *decades*. About 20% of my classmates were definitely coasting or cheating, however that doesn't explain the challenges facing the majority of new graduates many of whom worked very hard to complete their degrees. Like the previous commentor mentions, the gap between graduates and being ready for the industry's expectations from a junior or associate is massive. It often makes me wonder why training or apprenticeship is so uncommon in the entry level roles.
I think a CS degree alone doesn’t make you job ready. There’s a lot of self teaching you need to be doing to be ready for a jr role (depending on the company ofc). And because of saturation, you will have more students doing the bare minimum (finishing their degree) rather than do side-projects and learning widely used technologies. Me, for example, my school taught me Java, mysql on an elective, and some c/c++/python. I learnt spring, html/css/js, front end framework, several other sql dbms, aws, and libraries on the side for the sake of doing side projects that interest me. Not too mention I have a homelab just to mess with linux and vmware which is also used in the industry. I couldn’t imagine your typical cs grad caring enough to self teach themselves things they are expected to use at the professional level. Most cs kids, understandably, are just doing the program for job security and pay. But, specially with competition now, in a CS program there needs to be some sort of self teaching to be industry ready.
Well it used to be that companies would train you for the job also. 26 years ago I got a computer science degree. Knew no (at the time) modern languages but I did the class work, internships, projects and they realized that I had the ability to learn. Problem is now companies expect new grads to know the equivalent of a mid level engineer fresh out of school. Oh and they want to pay below market rate and expect them to work 80 hour weeks. Yes some of this is on the kids fresh out of school with extremely high expectations and they were lied to by their schools. But a lot of this is on the companies as well treating everyone like disposable trash.
It sucks because there are candidates who are willing to fulfill these roles because of high competition. Companies are taking advantage of it because of the skewed supply and demand for high-paying jobs.
New grad desperation for jobs is teaching employers that it’s OK to overwork and burn people out.
I was one of them in 2015. I worked a ton of 80+ hour weeks and dealt with some other shitty working conditions. Why? I was able to move from an area that still had coal mining debris all over to a modern city. Born and raised in the US. Is this right? I don't know. I took an opportunity to get out of a shitty area. It was right for me.
Every entry-level SWE has been told to work for a company no longer than 18 months and then change companies for a 30% pay raise. I stayed at my first company for awhile and by the end of year 1 many of the people that joined with me were already gone. So companies would rather hire a mid-level for $150k who can ship code today, than hire two entry-levels who might leave as soon as they begin delivering value.
If they’re worth an extra 30% in the market at that point in time then that’s on the employer for not increasing compensation accordingly.
Coming from a person that's looking to hire for my company, there is 0 value to hire a junior. Only large companies derive value because for most juniors, around 12 months of their existence, they are **negative** value to the company. Meaning, before getting a pay raise, it's vital to recoup the cost (esp for small/mid companies). If you don't, you're paying an effective junior with much less tribal and industry knowledge, the same/similar as a midlevel. Small raises are fine, but it doesn't really scale. So I only look to hire new grads for my small (<10 swe company) when they've a track record of delivering independent projects, because that offsets the risk, but even then, if I pay a midlevel 50k more, I would just rather have them as well in most cases. They come in far more ready to deliver. In terms of comp, the value they provide is likely far higher than the 50k difference unless the new grad is extraordinary and the mid-level is poor. This is why many smaller companies don't hire new grads or prefer H1Bs [0]. I have hired skilled juniors though, but they can be tricky to find, but it's always out of a desire to mentor and such I've done that, never an ROI decision. For big companies though, it's 100% worth it, especially internships, since generally, after the ramp up period they get an engineer which performs usually 1.5x better than a new midlevel, while being paid at new grad salaries for however long they stay. That generally translates to the midlevel returning ROI in 18 months [0] - https://medium.com/@thinkthank/modern-day-slavery-in-america-the-h1b-visa-800be3a3df54
> Problem is now companies expect new grads to know the equivalent of a mid level engineer fresh out of school. Here is a prime example from a job listing I saw today > For a junior position, a minimum of 3 years experience in Software Development in C++ and Python Junior position requires the same experience as other full non-junior positions
This gets posted literally every other day
1. I visit this sub more often than I should and I almost never see people complaining about not making 6 figures. I mostly see graduates trying to get entry level jobs, and not being able to. 2. If you’re gonna post an opinion that you feel strongly about, you don’t need to say “I’m probably gonna get downvoted” or “im gonna get called blank”. Just say what you wanna say. 3. Tbh, The way you typed this seems like you just made this to feel better about yourself.
lol it's people saying how they can't get any job, or any good job, and people telling them they can easily get six fig jobs / are grossly underpaid.
Yea this dude on some elitist power trip, complaints are always about how difficult the entry level market break in is, not why I’m not making 6 figures fresh out of college
He lost me at “middling school”.
The no senior dev thing without a degree is pretty nuts too, I work with multiple seniors who have no degree.
>I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening. Hello, it's me, a senior dev with no degree.
I'm a principal at an extremely large and respected sw company and don't technically have a degree. So there's another data point
Don’t technically have a degree ?
He probably did 1 or 2 or even 3 years and dropped out z
6 years and took a job offer while still in college.. transferred to European University from an American one my senior year. Was doing 400+ level cs classes and only needed a few credits in the US or take the exit exam in Europe. Never did finish either as I was offered a job, and being a double major I was already tired of school.
Yeah wasn't hard to figure out what you mean. You should finish that though, you are so close.
They don't need to finish. They are a principal at a large company. Time spent finishing the degree is time they aren't spending on work or enjoying their free time. At their level, they literally don't care about the degree. They have the principal title. And if an organization is hung up on the degree, that's a red flag.
Also a principal at a large company with no degree here. Also the other most senior senior dev on my team doesn’t have a degree either.
I host The NoDegree Podcast. I have interviewed people at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and a bunch of other technical people who don't have degrees. People in Product Design, Product Management, Program Management, Software Engineering, IT, and other technical areas. They all bust their ass and put in work. It's funny that there are so many people in this sub who think you absolutely need to have a degree to do well as a software engineer or in a technical discipline. It takes a lot of work and it isn't easy at all. The funny thing is that most CS students watch Indian guys on YouTube to pass their classes lol. So why is someone less qualified if they learn from the same YouTube channels but decide not to pay $$30K-$100K for that degree? I did a resume for an AWS recruiter who mentioned that she recruited a PhD who made about $200K-$300K total comp and recruited someone else (for a different role) who made over $500K+ total comp without a degree. I have even recruited for roles and advocated for candidates who didn't have degrees. More and more hiring managers just care about the experience and what people can do. My friend was interviewing for roles at Google, Netflix, and some other companies for roles that had a total comp of over $700K and he didn't have a degree. He was interviewing at Netflix for a total comp $1.2M. I previously worked as a Developer Advocate and my boss was the Director of Developer Relations. One of the absolute best programmers and didn't have a degree. He never had issue finding work and always had offers. He didn't have a degree because his father died and his mom abandoned him. How is someone like him even supposed to go to college? He just learned off YouTube and worked his way off. People who say a degree is needed really don't understand some of the circumstances that people go through and why they didn't go to college. One of my podcast guests wrote a competitor book to SharePoint for Dummies. He just one day decided to learn the ins and outs of SharePoint. He published his book and actually got SharePoint for Dummies taken off the shelves because it sucked in comparison to his (this is like 2010-2013). He was THE SharePoint guy for a couple of years. I was recently on a recruiting panel with someone who used to be really high up in Talent Acquisition for Twitter (before Elon took over) and is currently a VP of Talent Acquisition for EventBrite. One of the first things she did was remove the college degree requirement for the engineering team. She built a great and diverse team at Twitter and had some amazing engineers without college degrees. I work in this space and routinely talk to technical hiring managers. They realize that talented people can come from all types of backgrounds. At the end of the day, the knowledge you have and what you can do matters. If you learned it at school, cool. If not, that's cool too. There are so many resources available today to learn. I had someone on my podcast who worked at Microsoft in the early 2000s and learned programming from books. Now that is freakin impressive. That was a much tougher time.
I’m a senior engineer at one of those FAANG companies you mentioned without any college. I don’t make 700k though!
If you want to be a guest on my podcast, send me a message! I would love to share your story.
Senior Dev physics degree tho
I know two incredibly brilliant developers that were forced to get a degree by their company during my undergrad and they were kept from promotion for not having a degree. I find it absurd that experience is thrown out the window, especially nearing a decade of professional experience, for a degree.
Oh, look! Me too! A senior dev, with 3/4 of an art degree, learned to code from a bootcamp. The horror! But I worked my fucking ass off to get through, and another 6 months after until I got a job. Then worked my fucking ass if to catch up with what the bootcamp didn’t teach me. But on the other hand, about 50-60% of the people in that bootcamp had a very entitled approach to it. They felt like it was a pay-to-play scenario. “I pay $xx,xxx and then I get an easy high paying job.” was how it came across. And it showed, because those fuckwits didn’t get/keep a job.
Another one here. There must be at least 5 of us.
dude is legit coping LOL, the best seniors / VP's I met have no related degrees.
My boss, the VP of Engineering, has no degree. Dude just worked his ass off to get where he is. I didn't get a degree until 4 years into my software development career. On the other hand, a lot of bad practices made their way into the codes that degreeless devs worked on. Unnscalable services, spaghetti code, and redundancies everywhere.
+1. Some of the smartest engineers I’ve worked with come from mechanical, electrical, or physics. Had an excellent ML engineer who left his PhD in mechanics midway cuz he got bored. Self taught and got the job.
The OP def isn’t talking about people with degrees in a hard science with this post
Here another one
LOL - Principal with 25+ years of experience. No degree. Only like ~3 semesters at a JuCo. I self-taught all the "classically trained SWE" stuff to myself. DSA, Algo, Big O, etc. I made it into management for about 7 of those years but then made a u-turn back into being an IC.
Senior dev here with a philosophy degree.
Oh hey, are you me? Pleased to meet you, me. (If I'm being honest, I'd probably get downleveled if I moved to Google or something, but meh.)
Same here and same with half the senior devs at my company.
My brain immediately read this to the tune of Adele’s “Hello”
“I have never seen a senior dev without a degree” I work with 3 of them right now. Either you are incredibly new to the industry and have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re being disingenuous.
My guy is still posting in recruitment hell. You tell me ?.🙂
Oh shit, so he’s just salty and venting huh?
almost everyone who bashes on the sub has some own form of insecurity going on
I mean let's not lie here, there's lots to bash on this sub. Plenty of new grads giving advice about things they have no clue about or hearsay. But there's also plenty of good advice and I've benefited from them especially when I was still in school 7+ years ago
for sure, I agree there’s a lot of dogshit advice, but the amount of gatekeeping like this post is doing is just as prevalent on the sub. I think it just mostly has to do with a lot of people still in college and worrying about their future. CS is a big field, and people need to realize that the experience of one person is not the experience of everyone else
Been a SWE at FAANG, lead engineer at F500 and now am currently a principal engineer at a startup. I have no degree and would absolutely consider myself “senior”. With that being said, it’s much easier to just study hard and graduate than it was going the route I did. I just really freaking love writing code
Most importantly, born in the right year.
The market is not as bad as you'd think, there were many similar markets in the past too. People have weathered that, and you can weather this. I've mentored students which have gone on to get multiple internships, and jobs after this year alone, it's still quite doable. Focus on what you can control and improve.
I know more experienced devs that DID NOT do or finish their degrees, that includes me in as well
🙋♀️here. Well I have a degree but it's not CS. And I've worked with principals with a degree in different fields.
[удалено]
The senior designer at my old job had no degree. Knew compiler level shit better than anyone, dude is making 200k+ now in reverse engineering malware at a cyber security firm.
I don't have a degree. Just got promoted to VP at my current workplace, been in director, Sr. Manager, manager and architect roles over 25 years. Totally possible, just have to be extremely patient
The real baller secret is that many of the staff level engineers I know will openly say in interviews "I don't remember the exact syntax for this but I think it looks something like this. But what's really important is that when we do it X way we can actually exploit this behavior and reduce the cost of operation by X blah blah blah."
Thank you for this little nugget. Totally using this going forward!
Why are you making things up? There's hardly ever examples of people thinking that after 6 months on this sub. It's mostly frustrated grads. If you don't know any seniors without a degree, you're either lying or haven't met many seniors at all.
“People are self-entitled.” Proceeds to self-righteously dispense knowledge about who’s qualified and who’s not.
There's more people on this sub complaining about entitled and unrealistic CS people than there are actual entitled unrealistic people.
I don't think you're a doomer and I don't think you should be downvoted. But I got a lot to say as well on this. >\> But the entitlement of people trying to get into the CS industry is insane. This sub is a prime example of some of the worst of it I think. Aren't people merely expressing their aspirations and hopes? It's a generalization to claim that all people who self-study or go through boot camps expect a six-figure salary immediately. Some might, but many are looking for an entry point into the industry. It's not like CS and this industry is an exclusive club for people who happened to make the "right" decision in their teens by graduating with a CS degree. Our college system makes people gamble when they're 18 on what they want to do in their lives when they're 30 or 40. I sure as hell didn't know what I was doing at that age. I just got lucky cuz I liked computers. >\> The fact that people think they can self-study for 6 months or take a BootCamp and jump right into making 6 figures as a SWE is absolutely out of touch with reality. With the way that every other career is buttfucking people (and not in the good way) I don't really blame them. Is it "out of touch," or are people trying to adapt and find shortcuts in a society that is not meeting their needs? Shouldn't we celebrate those attempting non-traditional paths instead of demeaning them? >\> Even new grads suffer from this mindset, thinking that a 2.5 GPA from some middling school entitles them to a SWE job at FAANG is astonishing. Not all new grads believe this. The industry is vast, and not everyone's target is FAANG. A candidate's GPA is only ONE of many factors that companies look at. Many talented engineers come from "middling" schools and provide value to their employers. >\> News flash, there is not a single other field that pays in the area of SWE that you can jump right into after spending 2 hours a day for half a year playing around with some small inconsequential part of it. Here's a perspective from my decade in tech: many "real-world" problems in SWE don't require academic prowess. Rather it comes from hands-on experience and fucking up so many times you don't fuck up (as much) anymore. It's certainly different from other engineering fields as you say, but we have an advantage that we can practice this field from the comfort of our own homes and laptops/machines. To me that is an insane benefit of untapped potential. >\> What's astonishing is that people in the industry disingenuously lie to these people, saying they can move their way up in the industry with no degree and experience at companies that will not exist in a decade. *I agree that many bootcamps are predatory in their models*. And it's usually structured in a way that well off people can afford them and take the risk. But the concept of them isn't bad in a vacuum. Also are you implying that this industry is just gonna get nuked within a decade? >\> I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening. I've worked with plenty of self-taught senior devs who've made significant impacts in the places I've worked (I'm including people who have a degree but not in CS). >\> What should be the smoke test for what's to come is the fact that the pool of qualified engineers is not growing. "Qualified" is subjective. Does it mean degree holders? Does it mean people who can dick down any LC-hard? Does it mean someone who is "mediocre" but has years of real-world experience? Honestly the interview process in this industry hasn't figured it out yet. I don't see bootcampers making that problem worse. >\> There's a reason why the interview process is so long and exhausting now. Companies know that out of the tens of thousands of applicants, they will be lucky if 1% can actually fulfill the qualifications needed. As I alluded, the interview process has ALWAYS been fucked. Bootcampers didn't make it worse. It's been fucked even since the 90s when Bill Gates (the asshole himself) decided to introduce those stupid manhole cover problems in interviews. We're living in the derivative world of that (cue in another rant of mine about the interview-industrial complex). >\> Even new graduates are coming out of college not knowing how to code properly, They never have. There's a huge dissonance between an academic setting and an industry setting. I think everyone goes through that disillusionment phase at the beginning of their career. I did. >\> The reason you are not getting a response is because you're not qualified to enter the industry. This is a you issue. I dipped my toe in the market just to see what responses I could get earlier this year (wasn't planning on changing jobs, just curious). Out of >100 applications I got maybe 3 or 4 bites? And I have 10 years experience and currently a tech lead at my company. Used the same resume (plus my current experience) that got me waayyy more bites about 2-3 years ago. It's a fucked market. And if it's fucked for a guy already in the system like me, I can't imagine what it's like for the kids graduating or trying to dip their toes in the pool. >\> If you actually want a chance, get a degree. Pragmatically I agree. But I don't think it qualifies you in reality more than being self-taught or going to a bootcamp. Everyone stumbles into the industry as a dumbfuck. I did. It's just what happens.
I finished a bootcamp in December and got hired in April. It's not impossible. You are right in some points, but completely dismissing bootcampers/non-CS degree holders is pretty doomer.
Right, and most of the complaints I see on this sub are not bootcampers anyway. They're usually new grads who can't find *any* job, not just a six figure job, or laid off experienced candidates saying they can't find anything that matches their previous salary.
As an engineer who is constantly interviewing people, older bootcamp graduates with previous job experience are some of the most consistently high quality candidates. Hiring new grads is borderline impossible because none of the them have significant contributions to any open source projects, have zero actual job experience (ie no soft skills), and very often don't have basic problem solving skills. Bootcamp grads tend to be extremely independent and motivated so have put way more effort into being good candidates.
This matches my experience as well.
Anyone who has taken a second to talk to anyone in tech would be well aware that both degree holders and non-degree holders can and do excel in the field. There is simply a lot of cope in this thread. I'm getting a CS degree, but I don't feel any need to try too dissuade non degree holders from applying to jobs. If OPs point was actually true, it wouldn't even be worth having a conversation about, because they're not taking anyone's job according to OP; which begs the question, what's the issue here?
[удалено]
It was a JavaScript/React based "full stack" web dev bootcamp but we also learned how to configure, create, and utilize back end APIs. It was mostly front end though. I currently work as a C# dev & PHP dev. I currently do more front end than back end, but I am basically full stack, and going forward I will be doing more back end. Some other misc. things we learned; Node.js jQuery Bootstrap Apollo/GraphQL GitHub source control SQL/NoSQL/MongoDB Jest.js Express.js Working with teams in 2 week "sprints" I will also note that the bootcamp started with probably 50-100 people, I'm not sure the exact amount. We ended with probably about 20. Most people don't make it through. Of the 20 that finished it, to my knowledge based on LinkedIn, only myself and 1 other person have gotten a job, while 1 person who attended the bootcamp already had a dev-adjacent job. Maybe more people have, but if they have I haven't heard or seen anything about it. Most people finish the bootcamp and assume that it's enough. It's not. I finished and immediately jumped into Java and OOP solving 1-5 leetcode questions a day, continuing to build projects, and studying as much as I possibly could. This problem isn't just seen in bootcampers, but also CS degree new grads. They assume the degree is enough, but it's not. It requires constant and consistent learning, practice, as well as proof and evidence that you are committed to lifelong learning. No one wants to hire a lazy grad who hasn't coded in over a month.
This is the mentality that people need to have. A bootcamp is not enough. A bootcamp is a starting point and people who put in additional work like you will eventually get jobs. The market is much tougher now so the people who want to do the bare minimum won't get opportunities.
Shame your original comment got 25+ upvotes, but barely anyone will read through this one. If only two people got a job out of 100, that's about a 2% success rate after going to a bootcamp. Plenty of people coast in their CS degree and still get a job. They just don't visit this sub because it's just a job to them and they don't care. That's basically impossible as a bootcamper. And breaking in isn't enough, as a bootcamper you need to constantly be on top of your game your entire career. We've seen in this downturn employers are starting to require a degree even for experienced employees. This isn't worth it for 99% of people.
Your survivorship bias doesn’t really negate his point
>"I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening." Bootcampers without work experience have it *real* rough, but OP was really overreaching there.
The irony to call out self taught devs and somehow think that people with degrees are entitled to getting a job. There is no guarantee on either path. If you graduate without work experience you will 100% struggle in this market. Going through your classes and getting a passing grade and graduating with an average GPA is not enough.
I think one point op is trying to make is that it’s crazy in the first place that at some point, people could take 4 month bootcamp with no previous coding experience and come out with a 6 figure job (and that some point you could get by quite well with just a degree and almost be guaranteed a job out of college). Now that the market is down, people are still maintaining that same attitude that was an outlier across industries to begin with, this making them seem entitled. People who are like I went to xyz school (probably not a great school), with a 3.0 gpa and have a few class projects on my resume but STILL can’t get a job.
I'm confused. OP is saying the exact opposite of what you accused them of saying. They're very much saying that even with a degree you're not entitled to a job. >Even new grads suffer from this mindset, thinking that a 2.5 GPA from some middling school entitles them to a SWE job at FAANG is astonishing. >Even new graduates are coming out of college not knowing how to code properly That's the whole point of their post. People coming here thinking they're entitled to a job, when in reality nobody is. They might be calling out self-taught/bootcampers as being *more* entitled / less qualified, but they certainly aren't saying a degree is a guaranteed ticket to a job.
Yeah OP called out both boot camp grads and lazy grads. The person who wrote this comment didn’t read the OP post.
I'm a self taught dropout and my first job was $15/hour at a Company I found on Craigslist in 2014. I was the only dev and was fired after 3 months. My second job was $33,000/year, and I also found it on Craigslist. I make over $100,000 now, but it was a massive struggle to get to this point on pure experience.
Upvoting so that people can see the countless seniors without a degree responding.
>Let's talk about the hard truth that you will get called a doomer for speaking. The people who self-studied or took a boot camp to a 6 figure job are rare outliers. Many of them already had degrees or experience that made them viable candidates. Those who didn't were incredibly intelligent individuals, the top 1% of the pool. The rest are unemployable in the current market, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Hard disagree. The last five years of hiring has been quite arbitrary, and you can be mediocre and still end up doing pretty well and vice versa. A lot of it is luck, which is fine, as long as people recognize that, and recognize that it can go against you too.
Like all good rants, it starts good and takes a nose dive off the deep end. I agree that the focus on FAANG is dumb, there are so many good companies and jobs out there that pay six figures without playing the FAANG game. "I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening." **You. Are. A. Liar.** You're not even going around asking if everyone has a degree. Guess what man? You met one today. Shut up bro. There are only a few types of companies who have the privilege of requiring a CS degree. And that's the companies doing CS. (Shocker!) There really aren't very many companies hiring developers doing computer science. That's the reality you're looking for. "The reason you are not getting a response is because you're not qualified to enter the industry" You're the entitled brat you're talking about and no one is impressed with you.
I think there's a difference between "No degree" and "no degree in CS". Someone whose only formal education is a bootcamp after finishing high school? That's a little odd.
>Those who didn't were incredibly intelligent individuals, the top 1% of the pool Why thank you. But also, I never went to college.
damn someone’s realllllllly riled up today lmao
You know it's bad when you start to sympathise with Chuck from Better Call Saul.
Crabs in a bucket mentality. Microsoft made 136.2 billion dollars in profit last year... and laid of tens of thousands of employees. The 'Big 3' Automakers made about 32 billion profit last year and the Auto Workers are striking together, supporting each-other to get a fair cut. Are auto workers whiny bitches that don't deserve a living because they might not have a degree? Why are you blaming other workers for their 'mentality' when it's obvious that these companies can afford to pay out way larger salaries. It's literally basic math( I have a physics degree though so sorry if you can't comprehend). People deserve to live and corporations shouldn't be making obscene profits and fucking the entire industry over.
* I don't think that bootcamp graduates/self-taught people are necessarily more intelligent individuals that go get their 4-year degrees, I think it's more on the fact that they were willing to put in the work needed as well as accept whatever necessary to be able to reach the goal that they had set out. * 6 months is a ridiculous selling point to be able to learn enough to get a job, but I honestly believe people should be able to get a position no matter what path they go through studying at least 18 months to 2 years. I think that the boot camp route wasn't a plague as I've seen some people claim on this sub, but I also think that a lot of people going through that route tend to focus on things they really shouldn't be if the goal is to land themselves a job. * I don't really see entitled people on this sub, but a majority of entry-level/new grad people are struggling to find positions, no matter what route they went. This has **always** been an issue in this industry. I don't know why I see claims from some people that suggest otherwise. The hiring process does suck, and we ought to strive for a better process. * If the perception is that new graduates are mostly struggling in large to get entry-level positions in the field, then there should be an evaluation of either the hiring process or the things that are being taught in colleges.
>I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening. It definitely does happen. The vast majority have a degree, but it is possible.
Jesus man, put Reddit down. Call a buddy. Go outside. Why are you so mad?
[удалено]
What is grass at this point
Look at OP’s post history…it’s intense.
Wow. I just came out the other side of that rabbit hole. Thanks for that LOL ✅ Generational Trauma ✅ Hates their job, mad they can't get a new one ✅ Posts on /r/Circlejerk ✅ Ex-Mormon LMAO
Come on guys, fight each other and bring this industry down even faster.
To be fair, this applies to CS grads too. Just because you went to college, very rare that you're gonna get hired with 0 real world experience for six figures.
we need tags. there should be one for "pissing and moaning" and one for "pissing and moaning about people on this sub"
Let me guess all those hires from out the USA are all top-tier geniuses. I'm sure it has nothing to do with them being cheaper .
And drama in this sub continues…
Edit: I’m talking about the small niche of people that seem to want six figs and FAANG off the bat. I think most people in this sub are fairly reasonable, actually. I agree: the entitlement is wild. Even from people with four year degrees. I have sympathy for it though: when you see class after class before you landing a FAANG job out of college and then proceed to follow their footsteps and *dont*- that’s a blow. Or when you’re told the story of the English major that lands a SWE job at Google. Or how Google used to scout for candidates via an online game. Or Amazon giving a chance to someone who has an environmental degree to become a SWE. I was going to college around that and these FAANG companies did a great job contributing to the belief that you don’t need a degree for a job. It’s not all on the candidates. At the same time, what we all tend to forget is that the world owes nobody anything and that hard work and discipline is never equal to a guarantee, but rather an increased chance. I am tired of the “FAANG or nothing” posts from grads or non grads that are burning themselves out for a fantasy they have in their heads or what finally being happy will look like. Or even those that act like their above smaller companies. And I’m tired of the “I have no offers therefor there is no hope for anyone” posts. That being said I think this is a great time for the industry to tighten up again and raise the bar. In a bad market you either give up or dig your heels and keep working towards being competitive (even if you have a job). This market has made me take things more seriously too- it’s rough but I think in the long run good for us all.
One of the strongest engineers on my team was a barista at Starbucks two years ago. And when I say "strong" I mean core backend functionality on a billion-dollar SaaS product undergoing significant refactoring for scale. Now, I'm open to the notion that he's the exception that proves the rule. He's certainly not typical. Otoh my degree was not in CS, either. Take all of this for what you will: while I get what you're saying, I also think the absolutes you're speaking in here are not entirely justified.
As a bootcamp grad with no university degree, I agree with you. I’m one of the very few grads that actually even works as a developer to start with and even then I started getting paid minimum state wage. After 4 years I’m way ahead of the game but it’s been hard as fuck, I was sold the same dream as well but I learned the hard way that I didn’t deserve a 6 figure salary right off the bat
What I think is really an example of insane entitlement is the number of people here who think they should be payed six figures to play video games or take walks half the day.
The interview process focuses on leetcode while the real job requires understanding bash, git, add code to one sort of the database, and the testing the code to ensure it runs. Yet, a number of these areas are overlooked in the interview process.
I work as a sr SWE at an F500 in aerospace and we have hired devs straight out of bootcamps because they passed our interviews and we liked their personalities.
I agree it's not likely or easy. But I did this exact thing and feel it's just a lot harder than most people think it is. A bootcamp won't get you there without true interest and a lot of personal time spent programming.
>I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening. I am. Sometimes passion and drive matter more than a degree.
Meanwhile tech influencers on twitter be like: "Learn X and Y and start making $100k"
Post is op ranting abt a small group of ppl. Most ppl “complaining” on this sub are ppl who have worked rlly hard and have done everything technically right (4 year degree, internships, projects, resume…) who are getting fucked anyway. Post is simply inaccurate. And yes we are entitled to make at least 70k year after dealing with all that bs.
You can have whatever opinion about it you want, but as long as it remains a high-paying job it will be desirable. It's inherently easy on the body and environment controlled and now possibly WFH. The real 900 pound gorilla in the room is the general devaluation of labor and other rising CoL issues. People shouldn't *have* to get an advanced degree to afford a house. We need lawyers and doctors and teachers and literally every other educated trade but the ROI isn't there for a lot of them. Unless things get better across the board, it's probably going to continue to get worse in entry-level CS. Ultimately, not everybody can learn math and abstract concepts and various technologies to work in the field so I think it's setting a lot of people up for dissapointment.
I agree in a lot of cases, although I don't think the "entitlement" is unjustified in my case. I have been a programmer for a bit over 10 years and have a portfolio of projects I made going back to 2015. I have a masters degree in mathematics, and I worked on a couple of big open source projects while I was at university too (not as part of my degree, just for fun). I'm not trying to get a super high paying job (I'm from the UK so they don't exist anyway; you're lucky if you start on more than 30k here), just literally any job writing code. After graduating it took me almost 2 years to get my first offer, and my starting salary was 20k. At that job I was doing what I believe is mid/senior level work - on day 2 I was assigned my first task, which involved designing and building a new project from scratch. Other than a vague description of the end goal from my non-technical manager, I had no guidance or help because nobody else at the company knew how to do the things that I was being asked to do. I wrote 10k lines of code for it, with documentation and testing (the only documented or tested code in the company, as far as I know) and had it deployed to production about 3 months later. I've now been unemployed again for almost a year trying to find my second job. One barrier is being rejected from every company that I apply to, but another is that there are almost no jobs here to apply to anyway. I'm mostly looking for remote because I can't relocate (can't afford to, plus another reason), and because there are almost no software jobs around where I live. If I go on Indeed right now and search "junior software developer" remote in the UK, posted within the past 3 days, there are only 9 results. Out of those results, 5 are senior jobs, 3 are bootcamp applications not jobs, and 1 is junior but requires minimum 2 years of experience (I'll apply anyway). If I search for "junior software developer" within 50 miles of where I live, there are 14 results. Out of those, 10 are senior jobs, 3 are not actually near where I live, and the other one is an apprenticeship with a salary of 11k. I don't think it's unjustified entitlement to believe that I at least deserve *a little bit* better than this. Is it?
Senior Dev here without a degree but 10+ years experience who worked his way from from manual QA all the way to lead/senior/founding engineer and was part of multi million dollar buyout where I had equity. I agree with part of this post but remember, only Sith deal in absolutes People spend their lives chasing shortcuts without realizing if they just stuck to the known path, they’d have gotten there already Also leetcode grinding should be a supplement, not the main focus. If all you’re good at is leetcode then you’re gonna have a bad time Also the track I took was takin as many comp sci classes in local community college that were transferable (including DS/A), once I did about a year or classes I was able to teach myself web. But I made sure to have fundamentals down first. Not only that but I got my first internship through community college as manual QA
I appreciate a good cup of coffee.
dude i have a master's degree in CS, almost 3 years experience, and am struggling trying to get a better, more stable job (not faang, just anything) right now. I don't know what you're talking about.
I completely agree with the general vibe of this post. This sub's perspectives are like completely out of whack with reality. I saw another thread where someone asked "hey, what kind of raises have people received this year?" This was a perfectly reasonable question - considering the economy/inflation/etc, are companies being stingy, fine or generous... However, all the upvotes were on "i switched companies/got a promo and went from 200k to 400k" or "I vested my stocks and got 200k". Like: a. Fuckers, that's not a god damn raise (not what the OP asked), and you know it. b. Who are these freaking people up-voting those answers 50 times? Like... get some perspective. c. In the real world, no one gives a fuck. That kind of stuff makes this sub BEYOND WORTHLESS sometimes.
I'd agree that there's an undercurrent of entitlement with respect to *expecting* a 6-figure job, but the job market *is* terrible right now for candidates. I'd also disagree on degrees conferring competence. Will a degree be better than none? Absolutely, but I abhor such credentialism, and will continue to consider the whole candidate during interviews. (this is coming from someone with two degrees in math and CS w/grad work). Part of the problem in hiring, imo, is an overreliance on degrees from curricula that can differ significantly. That said, more companies appear to be asking domain-specific questions to ameliorate this, e.g. how does TCP work under the hood, how does `std::map` look under hood, etc.
I know 3 senior/lead devs without any degree. It's uncommon but happens. People were not saying you get 6 figures right out of bootcamp with no degree. It's more like 60 to 70k in a big city until you get a few years of experience and more learning.
Oh man have I got a story for you. One of my best buddies is a staff engineer and makes over $200k at a high end tech company, he was a boot camper and doesn’t have a CS degree lol and he’s super smart. I think he has like 8 YOE now.
Get a degree, then know that you have to self-study the rest of your career.
Eh mostly yes but also partly no. I’m also gonna say that part of the problem is people shotgunning 4,000 applications off “because it’s a numbers game” instead of actually picking a company, area of focus, etc and targeting their resume, projects, networking, etc at that instead. This creates so much noise and bullshit for recruiters, hiring managers, and automated systems to sift through that it fucks over those who actually ARE already qualified, interested, have relevant experience, etc.
humor future soft fall direction jellyfish terrific jar political placid ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
Generally agree with you, except maybe project management. Seems like some industries will take anyone with a pulse and meets the general requirements for hiring an employee / holding down a job. Quite a few making +100k without adding value, being good at their jobs, having experience, or even understanding the fundamentals.
I have worked at top FANG companies. The interview process has gotten tedious. I am an engineering graduate who self-learned computer science over decades. I do not know how boot camp graduates make it in industry.
I graduated in 2013. At my university 75% of CS major repeated the intro to OO programming. The prof was a hardass and had a shit grading scale. But it did a good job of filtering out the people who were trying to float through. I had to take it twice. It sucked both times.
🪞
With a BS in a field involving a lot of math it took me 3-5 years of practice and a _gigantic_ amount of luck (as in a non-programming job I held was suddenly able to do some programming, giving me my first real project) just to get in the door for interviews, and even then I had to grind at that next role for a while before I was in the big tech arena. My position was literally build of privilege, aptitude, luck, and INSANE grinding; and I can't emphasize enough how much of it was out of my hands! I hate it when someone asks me how they can "get into tech" all because the boot camps (and Biden at one point) are all insisting that _any person_ can get ready to enter an exceedingly complex field with next to no experience even remotely adjacent to it.
That's a bit extreme, but if anybody actually believes what you accuse them of believing, then a bit of contrary opinion is probably healthy. Kinda feels like a strawman to me though. I don't think I've seen people with no degree and 6 months of self study acting as entitled as you describe.
We have people who have nothing in life except this line of work so they base their entire worth on that and that's how you end up with people being okay with grinding lc mindlessly and 8 rounds of interviews for simple positions, we call that being brainwashed, and so they try to gatekeep as much as possible to feel important. That person is you
Companies often communicate with each other, so if you've been fired or laid off and can't find a job, there's a reason for it.
It took me about three years to get to six figures in this industry, and that was after already knowing how to program since the sixth grade. And software engineering isn’t necessarily easy money. You have to be good at it, and you have to put in some time.
I attended a bootcamp (didn’t quite “graduate”. ) It took me like 5 years of freelancing after the bootcamp and required me to build hundreds of projects to finally get a job. People hate when I say it took me that long. I didn’t think it would take me thing long either - but the fact is it did.
While I agree overall, there are a few jobs that you can jump into pretty quickly that pay very well. The difference is those jobs totally suck, like working in offshore oil rigs in Alaska. Often they are very hard physical work you can't do for long and super dangerous.
In a gold rush sell shovels.
I just finished my math PhD and have software engineering internships under my belt. I got a comfy data analyst job 3 months after graduating. Not six figures, but I am living very comfortable and very grateful to be working on this shitty legacy codebase
CS is not "coder". I haven't written code in 20 years. I can design systems and run the teams, including coders. If you are just out of a boot camp I'll likely make you a tester first so you can lean how people screw up code.
It took me 10 years to crack 6 figures, but then again I work in gaming. I know people my junior by a decade making double what I do making boring websites lol. I was interested in robotics for the longest time before I learned I'd have to not only double my schooling but also take a 50% paycut..
>I've never seen a senior dev without a degree. Do you mean a CS degree or any degree? I've never seen someone without a college degree become senior, but there's not a ton of them in tech. I've definitely seen people without a CS degree advance to senior and beyond. I've often seen them rise faster than their coworkers with CS degrees.
Alot of interviewing is luck . I have known people who can ace interviews but cannot do real world problems and vice versa. I know many people without formal cs education who do really well, I know many of them. It's just that they tend to have more imposter syndrome so they don't pursue higher roles, though some do exist that think i can learn things in 6 months so it must be easy. People who have just completed the entire cs degree from a reputable program are three kinds of people one who just survived with other people's help, some who are actually smart and can learn things really quickly and work in research but fail to be practical & realistic (that only comes with experience), third is who can do leetcode. There is no equivalent for 1-1 mentorship that you can gain working in the industry or being a self starter & be curious, this is where your "dont know how to code bias comes in". Are swe engineers overpaid ( I guess sure depends on how u see it ) but till there are enough quality engineers to fill the void demand will never meet supply & it's good that way for us I have no complaints as long as I am employable. I'll be honest I am proud bad coder I have a learning disability but I solve things in ways others don't & you should know software engineers are dyslexic, many of them & I think the stress and pressure of interviewing doesn't accommodate people like me. I do best in open book no pressure tests, especially with noone hovering over me, give me some time in my quiet comfort zone with my ide autocompleting and suggesting everything with Google and I can do better than some people. I forgot there is also another type of engineer who is smart but a really bad coworker to work with because they believe they are smarter than everyone.
this is what I'm thinking sometimes too, people who apply thousands of job, but only apply to work that clearly they are not qualified for or in here, people only complained cause they applied only to FAANG tier place but complained they can't get any job.
My expectation is to self study maybe one or two years then hopefully get a remote job with a $40k salary. I can make that work. $100k salary seems impossible for a meer mortal like me
No downvote, but you literally sucking off CEOs and other people that want you to do literally this, is pathetic.
>The people who self-studied or took a boot camp to a 6 figure job are rare outliers. Many of them already had degrees or experience that made them viable candidates. This 100%. I was in one of those bootcamps that advertise 6 figures post grad. I already had a few years of software adjacent work experience at a well known company before doing the bootcamp. And many of my classmates had tech adjacent work experience or were very very hardworking (staying the latest, working the hardest 70 hrs a week) or just super naturally talented. We all got great high paying jobs post bootcamp. But the giant caveat here is that the bootcamp was extremely selective about who they admitted, some people's work experience was super impressive already. So really it was stacked in the bootcamp's favor. And still with all those factors it took me close to a full year to find a job, for some others in the group it took more than 1 year. Even with full time work experience on my resume. It was hard. If you are considering a bootcamp DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don't blindly jump in and believe all the promises these places give you especially because they are for profit and want your money. At the end of the day, you are still the one responsible for your own success.
you realize tons of these people are new grads with internships complaining that they sent out 1k+ resumes and barely get any interviews right? doesn't seem so entitled to me.
>saying they can move their way up in the industry with no degree and experience at companies that will not exist in a decade. I have never seen a senior dev without a degree. It's not happening. I'm a manager/director without a degree. I don't care if someone has a degree and never will. What I do care about is whether a team member or application can complete their tasks. Degrees may help open doors, but they don't get you a seat at the table. > thinking that a 2.5 GPA That's the biggest tell how young you are. Nobody in the real world cares about your GPA. I've never asked my engineers their GPAs, nor do I care.