[mettamage]

Getting any programming job. I was too stuck on working for FAANG and that made me apply for 1.5 years. Getting a job and just doing something meant I slowly got experience. The pay was shit, the experience was okay. But then after 6 months when I applied again, I was seen as someone "with experience" (in 2018). I felt it was really unfair/crazy because I wasn't that much better.

To this day the toughest things I've done technically are at uni (Rowhammer via JS, hacking binaries, creating computer graphic engines from scratch, etc.).

There were some things in industry that were tougher. Mostly: navigating millions of lines of code, at one company.