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Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#111

Post by kungtotte »

fusiongyro wrote: post #108

There are a lot of public sector jobs that require any degree. My mother had a long and fulfilling career in the food stamp program, starting out helping people sign up and moving into training, supervision, and eventually became a county director. This is with a degree in anthropology. You’d be surprised how many jobs there are whose qualifications are like “be able to type and spell and generally help make things g…

I think a large hidden factor when comparing pay is the length (and cost) of the education required as well as hours worked. I make 45% more than the median income here (Sweden) with zero education and averaging 35 or so hours per week, working as a septic tank truck driver.

It's not as much as I'd make as a software developer; but I never had any student loans to worry about and what software devs are working 35 hour weeks and still make bank?

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#112

Post by MisterOctober »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #61
jokh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "pay reasonably well". It seems to me that most places that don't interview and filter candidates by asking algorithmic problems don't pay as well as those that do. That's just been my experience as a student that's interviewed for internships and is going to start interviewing for new grad positions in the fall. Also > (They do exist, even if they're not as common as they should be.) I'm curious wh…

At one of my companies we pay SF/BayArea market salaries and the way we hire (pretty much everyone, not just programmers) is: 1) short (10-20 min) phone interview, 2) if it seems like a good candidate we invite them for a paid test run, usually 2 weeks of actual real work, either remotely or in person, 3) if it works out, they get hired. Pretty much nothing will accurately predict how well someone is going to do on t…

"Pretty much nothing will accurately predict how well someone is going to do on the job."

^ this is a doggone well-phrased and accurate summation of the challenge of team-building. Raw capability is by no means a predictor of how well someone'll work with the organization.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#113

Post by whack »

johnsonjo wrote: post #107
whack wrote: post #101

> I experience PTSD like symptoms from the constant barrage of negative thoughts the difficulty and stress of doing these problems are causing me. A lot of the other posters have given some great advice from a technical perspective. I'd suggest taking some time to evaluate and improve your mental health as well. If you're putting yourself under so much pressure, that pressure alone will hold you back to a great exten…

This is really great advice. Being too stressed during an interview is not good for looking like a good job candidate. I’ll have to check out that book too, because I personally get a little too stressed public speaking, so thanks for the recommendation. That’s one of the great things about questions like these is they can be very relatable and you get such great advice from all walks of life.

Thanks. Since you mentioned public speaking, I would also strongly recommend Toastmasters as a way to improve your public speaking and overcoming-anxiety skills. I've personally tried it, and it really helped.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#114

Post by simondedalus »

IT or cybersecurity both benefit from CS (cybersecurity especially, since that's basically just CS/IT + read the news / some sec feeds + basic risk assessment and management).

the good thing about IT for you in particular is that scripting is so important to it that it might sharpen your programming skills enough to incline you back toward software engineering. sysadmin scripting is obviously less theoretically demanding than most software engineering tasks, but you can get the satisfaction of solving real problems (relatively) quickly using code--and knowing basic CS principles will only help, as long as you're open to learning the practical realities of IT, which often strain to breaking the idealistic assumptions many CS people have about how systems work and where/why they fail.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#115

Post by topmonk »

This may be a little out of the box, but have you considered teaching English? As long as you have a college degree (in any field) and are a native speaker, you could work as an English teacher in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. pretty easily.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#116

Post by nickodell »

I'm sorry about that. Maybe you can switch tracks without losing what you've already accomplished.

There's a paper by Phillip Guo about conversational programmers. These are people who do not program, but seek to learn programming so that they can be better at some non-programming task.

He's got three papers one this topic, but you're most interested in this one: http://pgbovine.net/publications/conversational-programmers-...

Particularly look at table 2, which is a summary of the motives of conversational programmers.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#119

Post by godot »

I don't know if this helps, but I personally find coding interview practice sites/problems to be extremely boring, difficult, not fun, and frustrating to work on. I'm saying this as a 13-years-of-experience software engineer; I've been called a rock star or ninja or something similar in almost every company and team I've worked in (big and small), and throughout my entire career and the numerous times I've job-hunted, I have never passed a single interview that involved those types of questions. (I've interviewed at both Google and Facebook, both more than once, at different points of my career, with no success) I pretty much always end up at a company where I had a really easy interview and we just talked about my experience and projects. I am (I'd like to think; and I think my coworkers mostly agree) good at everything involved in a software engineering job (building things, architecting things, communication, working well with others), but I absolutely cannot solve those whiteboard interview problems, especially during the interview.

I saw that itamarst posted a link for a list of companies who don't do "whiteboard interviews" type of questions. If you believe you're a good dev and can build stuff and just hate those interviews, I would encourage you to start there and try interviewing at those companies and land your first professional job, and see if you're really cut out for a software engineer role.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#120

Post by [deleted] »

flocial wrote: post #44

"Easy problems take me 2-5 hours." Are you sure you're not reinventing established theories and algorithms? Those problems are supposed to be hard because they're based on ideas discovered by the most brilliant minds. If you can do them in 2-5 hours with no background you might actually be real good. Depending on what level of familiarity you have with the material, you might be selling yourself really short. Deliber…

[deleted]
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