Ask HN: Any tips for a college freshman enrolled in computer science?

100% non-ai coding.

Sure, prompt studying in the right was is useful. But the temptation to spit something out you don't fully understand is huge. Part of learning is simply struggling.

Its tough, but for many of us it was a gauntlet of projects, internships, feeling like we're over our heads in a huge code base.

Focus on 1 code base at a time.

More useful to add to an existing code base than to code up some one-off project and name it "Jasper" (idk why CS student love derp names from their microprocessor. "I made a SSH wrapper and called it Turtle" )

Find mentorship from people who can teach architectural concepts.

Good luck!

I graduated in the housing crash which was brutal. The hard part is competing in interviews with people that have more experience when your only lever is that you are cheaper.

Jobs, internships, networking, and software engineering courses are critical. They let you speak like someone with much more experience. You don’t want to come into a questionable market with only raw CS skills. You will learn the CS, that is a given by your degree, so hone the critical people skills and how to work in a team. In a downturn no one wants to hire an unknown, so you need to be able to show that you aren’t green.

Internships with companies that are known to hire their interns are also a very good idea, even if it’s a “boring” company. These can be competitive, you gotta put that effort in.

Another good route in your later college years is also underpaid work assisting grad students or professors doing grant work. It shows you can apply what you learned, no one really wants to do it, it builds professional relationships, and it’s real job experience.

You have more flexibility in time than most. Dive in! Build stuff and see if it lands. You don’t have to finish your degree, though doing so is a wise default if nothing life-changing is landing. If you’re early to mid-senior year and the market is still this frothy, start making moves towards doing a masters degree. Unlike a Ph.D., masters are effectively professional and make you broadly more employable. And if while you’re in there you see market movement in an area of focus that you like, or you fall in love with a specialization, or the market is simply godawful and you need to delay your entrance, a doctorate may be viable as well.

All of which to say: the market is frothy and irrational, but you have a lot of optionality around timing your entrance.

I enrolled in 2002. The Nasdaq bottomed in September 2002, there was talk everywhere about outsourcing, but I went into it because that's where my passion was. I graduated into the 2006 job market which wasn't booming, but recovered enough. I remember chatting with younger coworkers about how we wish we saw the dot-com bubble. Then I saw the 2010-now tech industry.

Turns out I bought what's probably the largest investment in my lifetime at the bottom.

The industry will change in the next four years. What I didn't realize in 2002 was widespread broadband internet would arrive and change everything. Revision to mean is a thing, and I wouldn't expect the 2010's boom where tech moved to take over every corner of our lives, but it will still be there, and the systems take proper care and feeding. Remote work is equalizing global tech wages, but the talent's gotten better and the pie's gotten bigger.

If you don't have a passion for tech, pick a different major because you'll spend the next few years questioning your choice. If you stay with it, look for other areas in your life you enjoy so you can plan out a minor or double major. If you plan it right, you'll be able to reassess in three years and possibly pivot to math, actuarial science, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering with only an extra year.

Biggest thing I can recommend is to focus on the fundamentals, even if it doesn’t seem like it’s something you would use in practice.

Learn data structures and algorithms. Understand finite state machines and context free grammars. Learn at least some mathematics. Discrete math, Boolean logic, and statistics. Learn how operating systems work, networking, databases, compilers, machine code, low-level details like registers and the cache hierarchy. Learn more obscure programming languages: like Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, and Forth.

You probably won’t use those in your day job, but they will open your mind to fundamentally different ways of thinking about problems. Honestly, just try to learn as much as you can about as many different areas of computer science as possible. Don’t worry about learning version control, the latest web frameworks, or working with AI, at least not until the very end.

You want to come out of college with two things: the ability to learn new things quickly, and having a wide breadth of knowledge to draw upon. As someone who regularly interviews candidates, that’s what I’m looking for more than anything else.