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by ultrasounder 3012 days ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. I myself on a new quest to self-teach CS and change my career. I have been in the Technology field for the past 13 years or so but am pivoting to a software engineering career. CS50x is my first stop. I am intrigued by your experience with HarvardX. THe CS50x path now offers 3 more courses beyond the CS50x which i hope to take over the year or so to build my portfolio. Very inspiring to see someone achieve the impossible.
1 comments

I'm actually not a fan of CS50. I never took the course, but I went through the online material did the first few weeks of assignments. It is very broad and very shallow. It is also very hard and discouraging without some guided assistance. The students who take it for credit get a lot of help.

For a first CompSci course, the edX Python course is better, IMO.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mit...

Thanks for your feedback. I could see your point about the course being broad. With 6.0.0 the whole focus is on Python and CS. Congrats on "Getting the Google job", at which many a might folk have failed; https://medium.com/@googleyasheck/i-didnt-get-hired-here-s-w... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102

Are you able to share the role that you got hired in to? Was it a SRE?

thanks

Also, I got rejected twice (!) at Microsoft and didn't even get an interview at Amazon, so I can sympathize with "GoogleyAsHeck." Clearly hiring is a very noisy process with a lot of randomness. A lot of it is beyond your control no matter how much preparation is done.
I'm trying to stay anonymous and am concerned I may have already revealed too much. Let's just say it is a technical role that involves coding and leave it at that.
perfectly understand your concerns. Thanks again and wish you well on your journey!!!