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

#5 is invaluable.

"Hacker" or "tinkerer" mindset is very helpful. When hiring, especially at the entry level(s), those who hacker/tinker outside of their job usually standout and have a better understanding of how all the "things" we work with as Engineers connect because they are out there trying/failing outside of their 9-5.

The challenge with "hackers" is learning how to unplug, so make sure to develop skills/interests that are completely unrelated to "work".

Anything over 90% is gravy. If you have 97% in your algorithms class and 82% in your history class, you should try to spend more effort on history. And that will be hard to do, because there's less positive feedback from the other side of that engagement. Learning how to do what you don't like as much is hard, but worth doing.

1. A large (and growing) chunk of the industry considers object oriented programming to be absolutely terrible, but that's what they'll teach you in college. Learn functional programming and data-oriented programming in your spare time before your mind has completely set into OO. Make each of the three approaches intuitive. It will be way better for you down the road, and it will help you actually evaluate which approach is best. There's a lot of dogma on each side.

2. In my opinion it's cliche to say "social skills are more important than just the ability to program". Totally depends on what you're actually doing. If your job is to optimise server farms, they're going to pay you based on how many CPU cycles you save, not your ability to present to management. If you measurably reduce power consumption, you could be completely mute and it would be fine. You'll earn crazy money.

Play to your strengths. If you have poor social skills, find a niche where that doesn't matter. A good heuristic is whether performance is measurable. If it is, it matters less that you have trouble communicating it.

3. "Minor in Something Fun" is common advice & fine if your degree was cheap. It's terrible advice if you're going into $150k of debt. If something goes wrong in that situation, you're screwed. Minor in something that you can fall back on.

What if you develop RSI and lose the ability to type large volumes of text? That's the point of a minor, it's a backup plan. Life is unpredictable, when you have $150k of non-dischargeable debt it's much better to have a minor in "engineering" than "ultimate frisbee".

Pick one programming language and learn the hell out of it.

One way of deciding which language to choose is by surveying the top ten languages over the last 5 years and comparing it to the most common language most of your courses will be taught in. If your school is teaching Pascal or COBOL, the survey of relevant programming languages will help you avoid making the mistake of learning a “useless” language.

Then pick a nice tome, (I personally use the Deitel series) and just go through it faithfully for the next few years of college and after until - and this is the important part - you complete it.

You want a book with complete examples - not snippets of code. You have to type out these examples and have it run. This works in the skill of being able to write complete code of up to 200+ lines without breaking a sweat. A very valuable skill to have going into your senior year and the first few years of work. You don’t want to learn this on the job.

Learn the fundamentals of the language(loops, conditions, etc), learn data structures and algorithms and then learn to create GUI applications. Learn networking and databases. Learn everything in that one language. Again it’s important that you pick a general-purpose language to learn. You are not picking a language for its speed or unique characteristics, you simply want a language in which you can do everything.

And after all this learn to make simple games in that particular language or any other broad projects that you find interesting. I recommend game programming because it usually brings every part of the language together in one application, helping to keep your broad skill set sharp.

I’m also going to throw in a schedule you can use. Ideally aim for one week to complete a chapter, meaning a minimum of 2 hours every other day within a week. This weekly consistency will probably set in after your first year but if you stick to it, I can promise you from personal experience that you will master programming.

> I've been coding since I was young

but not leetcoding. get on it.