Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?

Except for a handful of classes it was mostly just letting us lift weights for an hour, but the instructor helped improve my form and I learned how to prepare my own weight training program. A good amount of it has stuck with me 10 years later, although I'm out of the habit of doing it regularly now (kinda hard to get back into it now because of the pandemic, too, except a couple of kettlebells I own).

You’ll notice that most people here are telling you to do some specific set of actions but few of them overlap significantly. That’s because there aren’t “right” things for you to do. They’re just pushing their biases on you.

I’d argue that you just take it easy and do whatever makes you happy. You can definitely still be successful that way.

I just finished my CS degree from a no-name state school with a below 3.0 gpa. But I still found a job making six figures (really good pay for my area) before I graduated. I attribute most of my success to the various pieces of software I wrote for fun. Just little things on my GitHub that helped me land a couple of internships.

https://missing.csail.mit.edu

Contrarily to w/e narrative people will tell you:

1. Most college junior/seniors look similar on paper. Especially after they do some GPA cutoff.

2. The recruiting process is a lot more about "fit" than you realize. The amount of "are you my kind" that goes on is more prevalent than you'd think. They can't admit to this of course. So a senior who vouch for you will go very far.

General advice: open your blinders and really get to know your classmates and professors. If you go to a to research school, your professors will often publish/collaborate w/ people on the R&D side of Google, Microsoft, etc. These jobs can be very differentiated, but the pipeline into these roles go through these professors. They do not go through your university cattle call machine.

Since when is this the worst case scenario for a CS grad? Last I checked, FAANGs value and compensate their engineers more than basically every other industry.

I double majored in economics and comp sci, then got a masters in cs/ml. I didn't plan on going to a FAANG until I realized a few things:

1. Staying in academia was clearly not an option for me. I still have friends who are miserable trying to get through their postdocs and I can't deal with the hobnobbery that some departments exhibit, the political infighting etc. I felt like if I got into the wrong program for a PhD I'd miss out on 5-8 years of my 20s and early 30s.

2. Did the startup thing. Found that most smaller startups are 90% talk and marketing and nothing really groundbreaking happens there. There are a few exceptions to that and if you're lucky enough to find one of those companies, good for you.

3. Other industries that don't focus on software often don't value SWEs the same way. It wasn't until a few years ago that the IT guy who maintained everyones desktops at a small financial firm and the person who wrote the internal software were the same individual. There is nothing wrong with those roles, but if you have the skills most CS grads acquire, you can specialize much more if you find a more software focused role

4. Starting my own thing isn't an option for me personally. I started some companies very early on when in doing my first degree (2009-11) and they failed, great experiences, don't need them again. If this is for you, then good, go for it.

5. FAANGs and other large software corps give you the structure to focus on work, like a laser, and then turn off and still maintain a healthy work/life balance. There are still politics and other bullshit to deal with, but your chances of finding a good team that minimize bullshit are high, in my experience. This doesn't happen at most startups where you have to play many roles. At a FAANG if you are really into a project, you're free to dive into it 24/7. If you're at a different phase in your life, say you just had your first child, you can take a step back and slow down for a bit. Nobody is going to ask "why haven't you pushed 50 diffs this week?" And obviously there is the pay.