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by wayoutthere 1645 days ago
Yeah, there’s a big difference between “kid with a CS degree” and “kid who interned at Microsoft for 3 summers and knows industry dev practices well”. This is why internships matter; it doesn’t even have to be a well-known company as long as it teaches you how to work on a dev team (git, agile workflow, DevOps, cloud, etc).

In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.
1 comments
bluefirebrand 1645 days ago
I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring"

I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.

I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.

It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.

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wayoutthere 1644 days ago
It’s crazy how variable experiences of that time are across geography; I was living in a high-growth city at the time (where I went to undergrad) and we basically went from 30% Y/Y growth to 20% for a couple years, so we never really even felt the recession. I didn’t even have a CS degree but they were hiring anyone with a pulse and PHP skills.

Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.

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visaals 1645 days ago
Dang that's a tough road to persevere through especially in '08. How did you get your big break?
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bluefirebrand 1645 days ago
Found a job through a connection I made during that four months and hung onto it for a few years to get some good experience, even though it sucked.

Moved to a bigger city from there and started trading up better positions with that experience.

Doing pretty good now, I'm a team lead at a company building some pretty cool stuff.

Still feels like if I had 2 or 3 internships during university I'd have had a lot smoother sailing. But who knows?

It definitely makes me think Software Development should be taught more like a trade with apprenticeships than anything else though.

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