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A computer science study plan to become a software engineer

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Re: A computer science study plan to become a software engineer

#5
Spoiler alert: https://medium.com/@googleyasheck/i-didnt-get-hired-here-s-w...

> Last week I received a rejection email from the recruiter, and at first, I thought it was a mistake, and laughed it off. I checked in with my referral and he inquired into it and lobbied on my behalf, but in the end, it didn’t change the situation.... The thing that bothers me is that I didn’t even get a phone screen. I didn’t even talk to a recruiter over the phone. After all this work and enthusiasm, I didn’t even get a chance to prove myself.... After speaking with some folks related to Google, the best I can determine is that they decided to pass because there wasn’t a good fit on any teams where I might be qualified. This is in agreement with the rejection email I received — there were no roles fitting my experience and background.

> I’ve been hired as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon!

Assuming you can get to the actual interview stage, the fastest option is to prepare by just grinding leetcode to maximize your chances of passing the interview. That won't help with aspects like the system design or behavioral interviews, but grinding leetcode will give you a better chance of passing the coding interview compared to studying CS theory.

Re: A computer science study plan to become a software engineer

#6
This isn't a bad list of topics about data structures, algorithms, and software fundamentals, but let's not pretend that computer science has anything to do with most software engineering roles. I studied computer science, and in 30 years, I've hardly used any of it. There were a few jobs where some of the statistics and math were helpful, but in my long career, I've seen very little overlap between computer science and working as a software engineer. Google and other big tech companies use these criteria to filter people out at the hiring stage, but the vast majority of work has nothing to do with any of this stuff.

Re: A computer science study plan to become a software engineer

#9

This isn't a bad list of topics about data structures, algorithms, and software fundamentals, but let's not pretend that computer science has anything to do with most software engineering roles. I studied computer science, and in 30 years, I've hardly used any of it. There were a few jobs where some of the statistics and math were helpful, but in my long career, I've seen very little overlap between computer science…

> and in 30 years, I've hardly used any of it.

Isn't that similar to people saying "I've never used trig in 30 years"? Isn't the point to train your brain to think in a certain way, more so than actually needing sines and cosines?

For computer science specifically, the goal is to teach you to think in terms of loops, conditionals, recursion and so on. It's to train the muscle more so than memorize specific algorithms or data structures.

Re: A computer science study plan to become a software engineer

#10
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1]

These coding challenges used to be a very good measure of ability, but now applicants are just memorizing the most common problems for each company. We're not at the point where these tests are useless but we will get there in the near future. The problem is that I haven't seen any good alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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