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Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

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21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#21
post #19

I can't stress enough how important college is. People who can drop out of college and still do extremely well are very rare: When you look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg (sp?), they had to drop out because their startups' success was a once-in-a-lifetime event. They also had family money to fall back on if their startups failed and they needed to go back to school. Many of the techies who I've met who dropped out…

> College isn't just about the book education. That's the easiest part. It's also about the social experience; but it's much harder to apply for jobs without the degree.

This can not be overstated.

University is the means with which one can reach out to knowledgeable people and build connections. The biggest mistake of my studies imho was not taking advantage of all the resources I had access to.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#23
Try getting a fulltime job if you can. You don't need to join college for CS education imo. There is not much benefit of a college degree unless it's from a elite/great college. The best resources to learn CS are online ex. https://teachyourselfcs.com/ is a good resource to self learn. Imo unless you want to go into academia you don't really need a degree atleast for software/security jobs. As far as socializing and learning soft skills is concerned, it can very easily be done in a job as well, you don't need to go to a university for it. Even better get a remote job or go backpacking around the world and you can fast track all those 4 years of socializing skills in a few months as well.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#24
Thoughts and random advice mixed together:

- Before you go to university/college and semi-regularly afterwards do a security/doxx/skip trace/etc. on yourself and your accounts. Even if you later do more impressive work, presenting your earliest work is going to be the only way to prove that you were working pre-18/pre college degree, and you are going to need that proof. The main thing is to make sure that there's nothing connecting to those accounts/handles/usernames that might make you unemployable or people not wanting to work with you. It's a good practice to get into because when you're 28 and handing over proofs of what you did when you were 14, you don't want to lose job offers because 14 year old you named your variables 'buttface' or said something that was acceptable in 2019 that isn't in 2035 or something.

- Consider what you want. Do you want to maximize for money? For free time? For autonomy/freedom? What types of tasks do you enjoy doing?

- Consider majoring/minoring in something completely unrelated to CS. One major benefit those of us with significant programming/tech experience pre college have is that we already have a trade/profession going into college. (I started when I was ~5-6). Keep up with your tech work, but doing coursework in areas like communications or business management or picking a rare domain to acquire knowledge in to combine with your tech skills is going to be very advantageous particularly in the middle or later parts of your career.

- Don't worry a bunch about low-balling yourself. It's really weird to try to get an idea of where you fit in the market if you're an outlier and talented young people get really mixed messages sometimes. I think the main question to ask yourself is do you want to go into smart contract or browser security work? You clearly could.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#25

Let me guess, your father just happens to be doing security research himself and as destiny would have it your interests intertwined?

No. I've started coding by my own at the age of 9, were playing the old gems of games, saw people developing cool stuff in games like Minecraft.

Got a java book for christmas, started learning and got into Minecraft development. At the age of 14, I started learning cpp, reverse engineering and a bit of ASM. Found a vulnerability in Epic Games by messing around with stuff, managed to report it and was rewarded, then I simply kept going and made security research to my hobby.

My family is not familiar with software, but with hardware, so I got my hands on a PC very early. No pressure tho.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#26
post #14

I can relate, as I started my career at 16, setting up a small ISP from scratch without any prior knowledge of computer networking and doing the work remotely, part-time since recently when the company was acquired by a larger ISP. They had about 2000 subscribers when they sold it. Besides that, I've worked full time on Linux administration at a large scale and in the last years on cloud architecture. When starting u…

Thanks for your message.

"and will easily land a job when the time will come." Well, that's the thing. I don't want to leave out any opportunities, just because I was lazy in my young years. There are many insanely good people out there and I heard companies more look at years of experience and certifications, instead of public "achievements" like HackerOne, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#27
post #19

I can't stress enough how important college is. People who can drop out of college and still do extremely well are very rare: When you look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg (sp?), they had to drop out because their startups' success was a once-in-a-lifetime event. They also had family money to fall back on if their startups failed and they needed to go back to school. Many of the techies who I've met who dropped out…

Applying for CS jobs is difficult full stop, with or without the degree.

I can't remember the last time I got invited to even the first stage! University doesn't fix that.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#28

There are a few paths forward for you, and a lot hinge upon your skills outside of security (somewhat your morality). Computer security is a lucrative field, and a broad one. You could continue the bug bounty approach, which leads into vuln selling (with the attendant morality questions). You could go into systems security research, a long term project but worthwhile intellectually. You could contract (needs networki…

> You could continue the bug bounty approach, which leads into vuln selling (with the attendant morality questions)

Can you elaborate on this?

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#29

There are a few paths forward for you, and a lot hinge upon your skills outside of security (somewhat your morality). Computer security is a lucrative field, and a broad one. You could continue the bug bounty approach, which leads into vuln selling (with the attendant morality questions). You could go into systems security research, a long term project but worthwhile intellectually. You could contract (needs networki…

Thanks, much appreciated.

"You could contract (needs networking and business), you could FAANG (needs patience and soft skills), you could government (needs patience and more patience)" That sounds like a insanely hard approach. I don't really have anything to show, only really got my HackerOne profile to show. Most projects I do is related to it, which I don't really publish or just not allowed to publish.

Re: Ask HN: Need Career Recommendations

#30
post #19

I can't stress enough how important college is. People who can drop out of college and still do extremely well are very rare: When you look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg (sp?), they had to drop out because their startups' success was a once-in-a-lifetime event. They also had family money to fall back on if their startups failed and they needed to go back to school. Many of the techies who I've met who dropped out…

College also serves as a buffer, giving you dedicated time and space grow.

The self-taught route is a viable path but if growth is what you want, the early stages requires more work than most realize.

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