I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Computer Science is probably the only major where if you suck at it and end up dropping out, you're more likely to be a leader than someone who is good at it and sticks with it.

There were roughly 200 people in my freshman class majoring in CS, by my sophomore year that number had dropped to about 120. A lot of people dropped out because it was too damn difficult for them, and they switched to less technical majors like "Business Information Technology" or "Management Information Systems." Almost without exception, the people who dropped out are now managing teams of developers, they actually have programmers reporting to them. Seriously, WTF?

This isn't even the worst of it, there are people who majored in art history who are now "product managers," who take the word "manager" in their job title literally, they think they're above developers. Some of them will even profess with no small amount of pride that they "know nothing about technology." You can hear the pride in their voice when they say it, as if they're saying "I'm a lot of things, but at least I'm not a geek." Is there any other field of study where people boast with such pride that they know nothing about it? I mean, very few people will say "I know nothing about history" or "I know nothing about literature", and if they do say it, they'll say it with a bit of humility. When it comes to Computer Science though, knowing nothing about it is almost a badge of honor.

Rant the f**k over.

So many people are applying for computer science majors that it's making me nervous.

My classmates don't know shit about tech yet almost all of them are applying for CS. It's even the most popular ranked major in the US.

I don't think I stand a chance against them. They all have higher GPAs than me, and they participate in clubs and sports.

If those cave people get accepted I'm not going to be too happy about it.

To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

When you are a CS major/part time developer and your uncle gives you a swiss army knife as a present "so if you have to fix computers you have the screwdriver ready"

Applying to a school for CS major, and they can't even fix their website to not have a null pointer exception...

Do I really want to go here?

CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".

So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.

At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.

A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:

"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.

"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!

I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!

It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.

2008: Made my new PC go Blue Screen within 3 months. Knew I wanted to do "something with computers".

2016: CS Major. ✌(◕‿-)✌

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

I'm from the UK. My CS teacher took a dislike to me in junior high school, dissuading me from taking the classes I needed to take computer science at college. I ended up starting an economics major and then dropping out.

With the support of my family and friends I started over as a self taught as a developer.

I'm now a Tech Director in New York and love my job.

loooool so many people cheat & skate their way through the CS major at my university. they’re in for the rudest awakening when an employer asks them to design an algorithm on a whiteboard

Holy shit. I'm sitting in my CS class and I just heard someone complaining about the stupid responses they get when they tell people they're a CS major.

I heard a new one that is honestly the most stupid fucking thing ever. She told someone she's a CS major and they replied "Oh so are you taking a lot of chemistry classes or something?"

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

I start my first real dev position tomorrow 6 months out of college where I graduated without a CS degree because my school didn't have a major only a minor.

Cue the imposter syndrome.

Every Group Project in CS Major
Group 1:- Hey group 2 what project are you making ..?
Group 2:- Can't tell , Top Secret

FINAL Day:-
Group 1:- Railway Ticket Booking System
Group 2:-Railway Ticket Authorization System

Evaluators :- I think I saw similar idea somewhere....😂

me: I will major in CS so I can work with computers, not people

narrator: But little did he know...

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

When you're a fourth semester Java student and decide to try your hand at making an android app... Only to find that it involves almost none of what you've learned so far.

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

FIRST RANT: When someone tries to scam a CS major...

Ok, so today I received a msg from a super hot guy on Grindr (that's right, I went there >_<). We chatted for a bit, traded some photos, his full frontal matched his profile pic so I was impressed. Then suddendly he asked me if I could "check out his fanpage" through a link that he will send to me..

"Mmmmmmmm that sounds like a scam bruh."

The mofo didn't give up and even had the nerve to try and assure me that "scammers will ask for money upfront and they're usually from another country (WTF??)"

"DUDE, I'm a Computer Science student! Not particularly fond of links!"

And then he blocked me. HAHAHA #DODGEDIT

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

Ok I’m fed up. I feel that computer science major in majority of universities are filled with individuals that memorise code for their assessments as if it is history or civics major.
I mean wtf?
If all you are good at is memorising why did you that cs as your major?
And how far do you think is memorising the simple jackass 20 LOC long shit piece of coding program will take you in the industry?????????

The TA for my computing lab in uni consistently shows up 45 minutes late. I'm usually done in 20 because I use the rest of the time to work on the next lab.

He walks through the door, lets out the biggest sigh, sits down, sighs again, opens up his laptop, and sighs once more. When someone asks for help, he sighs so hard you can see his lungs shrivel up as he exhales, and then provides them with a pointless answer.

The best part about the cs department here is that when you join cs, you are given an account to use with the ubuntu machines in the computer labs. They send you the password over school email, and you can't change it on any system they provide.

The struggle of being a gay CS major is that all of my classes are 95% guys but all of them are painfully straight. Send help

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

One time I got an offer for a job I had found through a recruiter. When I wasn't sure if I was going to take the job, and it became clear to the recruiter that he wasn't going to be able to convince me, he had his "manager" get on the phone to try to tell me why I needed to take the job. One of the reasons was "because I was a recent college graduate and wasn't a CS major (I was a minor but had a lot of experience), this was the best offer I could get." It thought it was pretty sad that they resorted to insulting me to try to get me to take the job so they could get their commission. Sleeaaazzzyyy.

After a year of college give everyone 2 hours to solve a programming problem in the language of their choice. Like implement a doubly linked list, or count the number of primes between two integers or something straightforward. Anyone who can’t do it gets kicked out of the major.

I’m sick of dealing with people who are 3 or 4 years into a CS degree, and can’t do 30-line programming assignments in two weeks. I might have to work with one of these clowns someday and I hope to God that my university doesn’t send them into the workforce with a degree.

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

CS major is fun until the devil called math arrives

about 2 weeks ago my mom's friend's family visit our house. one moment they introduce their brilliant son going to take Computer Science Major, and they didn't understand why, and apparently they are some kind of ignorant family. So my role here are to advertise and promote the world of CS (since i know their son are good at programming). one moment i am diving to deep into my own speech, i am like :

"I believe you guys using facebook, and Whatsapp all the time **give a smirk and sarcastic look* (which they actually did), that is our work there. and maybe you (my mom's friend) love to play candy crush with my mom, yes that is also our work, and we got a lot of money from you buying the candy to unlock the hard level (the microtransaction thing) MUAHAHAHAHA !" ---

and yes i am laughing like a monster in a film. and suddenly that becoming the most awkward thing i ever had.

and i don't know should i feel bad or not introducing CS like that.

When I still in college one of my friend called me
Friend : you major is CS right?
Me: yeah
Friend : I want to buy a new PC
Me : cool
Friend :just to check with you what is the price for a 512M memory?
Me : ......

A girl I know is a Economics major with a minor in CS. Today she told me and a friend how hard their Java course is. I asked her about the topics that get covered in that course and when I asked her about JavaFX.
"No we will not cover JavaFX, only Java an GUI programmig in it. "

Today I learned that JavaFX is not a part of Java :D

To those of you who have IT degrees, what exactly did you learn?

I've got the opportunity to double major in CS and IT, with it taking a total of 5 years. It's basically 1 extra year for the IT degree, since the CS takes 4 years with my general education classes. (It's a total of 13 extra class to get the IT degree.)

Part of me wants to just because it seems fun to learn my biggest tool if I'm going to program. And part of me acknowledges it's also a potential job if I'm unable to get a programming job at some point.

Does anyone else have a major problem with over thinking debugging or like the code to write in general?

I spent 10 minutes the other day reading over 6 lines of code only to realize 2 words were capitalized when they shouldn't have been.

Wednesday night, i was doing my CS homework. The question wanted me to swap variable values using a third variable. I stared at it for 30 minutes scratching my head. (I did Google it and read the notes I took.) And when I saw the solution, it was so simple that I face palmed really hard.

I honestly don't understand people who genuinely believe formal schooling will cover all the basics they need to know to do a real-life job, and still get barely passing grades on all relevant subjects.

I genuinely don't understand people who copy GitHub projects to pass classes, and graduate from a university with goddamn StackOverflow instead of a brain.

Whom I understand even less are people who don't do anything major-related on their spare time.

I mean, change your fucking major, do what you actually like, do things that actually light your nuts with passion.

Please don't waste my time pretending you are in it not just because it's potentially well-paid and "cool".

Please don't waste my time being my coworker.

Yes, I'm looking at you, trendy wanker with a CS degree and no personal projects.

P.S. Junior here. Yes, I'm full of hatred for all the "real programmers" in the industry out there. I hoped for a better experience.

P.S.S. I mean absolutely no offense to people using either GitHub or StackOverflow outside of the aforementioned context.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

I suffer from major imposter syndrome, despite having years of experience, domain knowledge, and a MS in CS. Help.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a carpenter like my dad, my parents reaction was always "just keep studying and you can do whatever you want, if you wanna study then do it and don't care about anything else we will help you".

Growing up I became a bit of a geek by hanging out with my uncles (they were the pc gurus in the old days, not anymore hehe). When choosing a college major I knew I wanted it in some kind of engineering, but had no idea besides that, I ended up choosing CS somewhat random and loved the thrill of solving problems so I stuck with it. During it all my parents only really said "as long as you study so you can have what we couldn't give you and do something you like, we will support you!"
I love my parents! 😄

Side note: I think my parents love to be able to brag about my accomplishments, kind of feels like they are entitled to though, since pretty much everything is thanks to them!

So I gave my younger brother my OnePlus One since he is now using an even older Google Nexus and don't care much for phones. The camera is slightly better basically.

Asked him to test drive it:

Me: so did you set it up yet?
B: nope, what's the rush?
Me: well you see it's running a custom OS (Lineage) as it technically doesn't support it. You need to test drive it and make sure it works with your SIM? May need to change some configs
B: sounds like a pain, should I just get a new phone?

Me: ... yes probably...

He's a just graduated CS major that doesn't like tinkering with tech...

(Well can I have it back then so I can play around with it?)

#DoneAndDusted
Finally completed final year major project, last step of B.E. in CS COMPLETED!
Joining office in June as full time in same company which I did internship. Work will be long and tough but interesting.

I don't have a Computer Science (CS) degree, but I do know a lot of Computer Shit. Major Computer Shit. So yeah, I guess I major in CS after all.

Amount needed to buy an apartment: $300k

Current (liquid) net worth: $350k

After: $50k

Thoughts:
-I hope I'm not buying a lemon
-I need more money... a better paying job... this took me 6 years...
-I think I now know how my dad felt paying for private college; he should've just brought me an apartment instead...

-It's nice I found a job programming, CS was not my college major.
-I wish I studied CS? Then maybe I could've gotten into Google...

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

I am currently a CS major, studying in a toxic university that teaches no more than old-school stuff.

I know HTML, CSS, and JS (self-taught), and at present, I am spending time on React.js.

I'm also a competitive programmer.

I badly wanna move out of this toxic educational environment and wanna do something that's worth spending time on.

I am feeling like I am just wasting both my time and money in this old-school university.

what should I do? help me out?

I am thinking that once I am fluent enough with HTML, CSS, JS, React, and some database stuff, I must start finding jobs in small startups.

badly need some guidance. PLEASE HELP ME...

Ah, so the great war I my head has begun. When you're a CS major in college, you can't help but realize that knowing everything about computers and how to develop everything on thrm is next to impossible. So you start to question "what will be my specialty?". "Web dev or Low-level? "swirl through my head. I work on projects when I should be writing that 5-page essay for that College Composition course I care nothing about. Then on my own time I need to openly practice and refine my craft, and studying. Sheesh, I hate time (or the lack thereof). How do you do anything major on your own these days?

Fucking Fucking Fuck.... fucking acumatica and fucking IIS.
I’m not shitting on CS or ASP but the fucking windows server/IIS implementation. No one should use that shit. Fucking horrendous garbage.

Literally every goddamn thing we do in acumatica has major fucking gotchas.

Today apparently goddamn concurrency is fucked cause IIS and acumatica. I love friggen obscure issues being only documented in a friggen comment on a damn post in a random difficult to search corner of the friggin internet.

I regret ever picking my CS major every time I stare at my VS Debugger and am stuck reading the values stored in a List<Int>. Why, List<Int>, as the backing for my shortest path, do you not have the proper values after I walk my tree.

I have lovingly set up my Priority Queue. I have followed the class notes and lectures.

Oh why, my List, have your forsaken me?

Oh.

It's a recursion bug. I'm not updating nodes properly.

I'm a dumb ass.

My school didn't have any programming or CS classes, so I started to learn python online my junior year. I thought it was interesting so I declared a CS major in University. Now I'm about to graduate knowing java, c++, Ruby on rails, c#

I don't know how it's out there, but where I'm from, we don't get a lot of practical classes. The curriculum has tried to include practical alongside theory but its just not working. All we do is theory and more theory. Maybe include a major portion of marks for practicals rather than theory. And yes, please no coding in paper.

Another major thing we lack is teaching logical thinking. I have met final year under grads who find using a (!foo) to invert the value of foo mind blowing. They would rather use a full blown if-then statement to do the same. I think we need to incorporate chapters that motivates students into logical thinking to make better programmers.

Another essential part CS education around here lacks is in relevant examples and chances for internship. If you're studying something, I believe you would understand it much better if you see and experience it. Curriculum should include a real world project that you would use in a daily basis. Maybe break down and analyse a successful application and its component.

Hm... I just realized something... Even though my bro is a CS major and got into a school I couldn't and knows like C++. I've done a lot more dev (programs, websites) than him at his age... and yet...

I often wonder whether I'm actually really good or perhaps it's just my ego...

tl;dr
that moment was a full semester

full
I was an Electrical Engineering major taking a Data Structures class and for the first time, I understood the title computer SCIENCE. In EE, you just blueprint all day long, but you never build anything. In CS you build and blueprint at the same time.

Fuuuuuuuck!!
CR estimates:
Part 1: 2h including testing
Part 2: 2h-2days-maybe never (small changes on horrifically fucked up project noone understands with tons of tech debt)

Managed to pull off the part two in one day.. //yay me?!

Additional day to unfuckup git fuckups (including but not limited to master head not compiling because a smartass included *.cs in .gitignore file which he also pushed..don't ask, I have no clue why..) which was a huuuge deal for me as I usually use only local repo and had no idea how to tackle this.. coworker helped out.. seems I was on the right way, but git push branchy was acting up & said I had to login & ofc I had no clue what the pass was set to (first setup was more than 2yrs ago)..so new key, new pass.. all good.. yay!

Back to the original story/rant: Now I'm stuck with writing jira explanation why it was done this way & not the way customer suggested. They offered only vague description anyways which would require me to do a hacky messy thing, ew.. + it most probably would require major data modifications after deployment to even make it work..

Anyhow, this expanation is also easy peasy in english..
BUT...
I must write it in my native tongue.. o.O FML! Spent almost 40mins on one paragraph..

Sooo.. if anyone will petition to ban non english in IT, I'm all for it!!

Give up trying to change CS education since current formal education systems used since the prehistoric times are unable to teach CS properly. Instead, tell the students from day 1: "What you'll learn is either already outdated or will be outdated by the time you graduate. Be ready to learn stuff by yourselves or switch your major."

I had a relative that used to come to our house to study because her home was kinda far and also because we had a computer .
She was studying computer science at the time and I was only 13-14 years old. One day she came with 3 CDs of red hat. I asked her about it and she told me it's something like windows. My reaction was wow it must be something huge because I knew at the windows XP was only the size of one CD .
My relation with computers was only to play games and some music that's why I couldn't hold myself not to install it. I fucked my computer endless times, It was like playing puzzles let's try this option and then switch to another... It took me like 4 days to install and I was really impressed with it you know seeing the terminal and stuff. Weeks later I switched back to Windows because I couldn't install my games and play mp3 files (require to install some libraries and I had no internet).
Fast forward 8 years later and I was studying linux system for CS degree and guess what? I was the major in class because I knew about many stuff like partition systems (ext2, swap..) and how to install linux on a computer...
This was my feeling 😎 at class.

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

My fellow devs, appreciate what you have right now, even if it doesn't seem that great. I've recently switched majors from Bioinformatics to Medicine and I wouldn't say I regret it, but I do certainly doubt this decision sometimes. While studying Bioinformatics, I was always really interested in the biological part, often wanting to learn more about medical topics and such, thinking if I did switch, I could always keep programming as a hobby. Now I did switch and I miss being in a professional CS field so much. Medicine is great, but the people who study are mentally completely different from people that code. I still code small projects on the side, but don't really have anyone to talk to about them and I'm even starting to regret not paying more attention in linear algebra. I miss linear algebra, think about how ridiculous that is haha. Anyways, if you are looking forward to a major change in your life, it might not be all that you think it will be. So look at your current situation, it might be what you wanted all along.
Thanks for listening.
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Also it is incredible, how technologically incompetent most medical students are lol

My teacher at UTSA; Dr. Maynard, was the best teacher I have ever had. His tests were tough but fair, he actually took the time to teach instead of reading from a slide deck, and there was no question he didn’t have an answer for.

People once got mad and wrote on a board in the CS lab “if you think Maynard’s exams are too hard, write your name here”. I changed the prompt to say “if you should change your major to business, write your name here”. He thought it was hilarious.

!rant

After a year and a half of semi-depression stuck in a Master Science in SE (while I'm a CS student in machine learning and don't give a bloody fuck about java plugins), I finally decided to switch to a CS major.
No more research money but damn, did not feel that relieved in one year !

Lesson learned : don't pick a job or whatever just because it's better paid !

Currently have the most experienced guy with this code baseline showing me how to implement something. I have not seen a code base this badly designed since I told someone they should quit the CS major.

So Im still a college student but my worst burnout happened a week before finals this year as a sophomore at DigiPen

On the same week, I had to conduct and submit 10 playtests for my competitive Unity game by Friday, submit said game polished and completed on Sunday, finish and submit my team game project that I've been working on the whole year with 10 other people also on Sunday (which we would discover so many TCR submission issues we ended up finally resubmitting on Thursday the following week).

On top of this I had to write a memory manager for my operating systems class due Thursday, a water retainment assignment involving recursive queues for my Data Structures class due Saturday, and to top it all off that class also had a final Thursday when that memory manager was due :'). I don't know how I managed to get OK sleep.

All stuff was due that week so all game teams could have next week before finals to work on submitting, so some CS teachers also move their finals to before that to theoretically distribute the load (which sucks for people in my major because we're almost a double major for CS and Game Design) However my team wanted to submit early to snatch some bonus points but we ended up having to resubmit late anyways :(. Due to the week of hell we were already burned out when trying fix our resubmission.

I love the school and the people in it but there's a reason why our most heard phrase is "I want to die" and no its not just a millenial thing I swear.

I feel like I am not CS major.

I doble major'ed on 3rd year, so don't have deep knowledge like other 'real' CS majors.

I've mentioned this before, but I never really understood bit flags until I tried out Cocos 2D and read about how you implement hit detection. You identify different rendered objects with an enum value, and it would spit out a result every frame that you use bitwise logic on with the enum to determine which objects were touching. Such a simple and elegant way to represent combined state.

It may be elementary for some folks but I was not a CS major.

I probably knew I wanted to be a dev/programmer in late highschool. I was fascinated by the underlying structure to what I see on a computer screen, and idolized those who "hacked" as a form of political rebellion.

Now I'm in my senior year in college as a Computer Engineering major because CS was ridiculously competitive at this college. I'm actually quite happy about this, because I feel I know more about computers in general by taking this path rather than CS.

Le neue studento (a.k.a. new students) be like :

- What's the difference between Java and JavaScript? Different version? It's the same, is it?

🤔🤔🤔🤔
🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

val true : bool = isFrustrated(me : Human)

1) Honestly fuck SML. Who's goddamn idea was it to make a useless fucking programming language that does absolutely nothing relevant unless you're trying to learn recursion. Who's fucking idea was it to not be able to even have side effects. And who gives a shit if you can explicitly declare the type of variables on every single fucking line that's what comments are for if you really need it. All this is aside from the fact that nobody ever has been like "OH UNMUTABLE TYPES? WOW IM SO HAPPY THIS IS SO USEFUL". At this point I feel like SML is basically a DFA - ABSOLUTELY FUCKING USELESS

2) Aside from that, who's idea was it to duplicate two classes. There's 15-122 (Principles of Imperative Computation) and 15-150 (Principles of Functional Programming). So far the ONLY fucking thing different is we learned about work and span in 15-150 - OTHER THAN THAT ITS LIKE TAKING THE EXACT SAME COURSE. BUT AGAIN. So then I have to fucking sit in lecture and pay attention for that tiny bit of information that is new amongst the giant cesspool of information that isn't. BECAUSE I ALREADY LEARNED IT.
Oh and did I mention that both classes are required to graduate as a CS major? Fuck me.

Thanks devRant for helping <3

Edit: We are 4 weeks into the semester so you'd expect we'd have gotten into the new stuff by now right????

It really depends on what time of the year it is. During the fall and spring semesters, my dev life and social life are about as balanced as they're going to get. From working on things in the CS class to socializing with the people I've met in those classes, this part of the year is pretty balanced in my opinion. During breaks and the summer, however, I don't really have a dev life. I don't have a dev job, so really the only times I do have a dev life is when I willingly decide to work on a side project, or have to update some major stuff on one of my three personal websites. Other than that, the only life I have during those breaks is my social life with the buddies I play PC games with on Discord.

I will say this, though. The day will come when I will be having to balance a dev life and a social life year-round. To be honest, I'm not really looking forward to that day.

"Well GPU main memory is L2. CPU main memory is L3. Which is why GPUs are so much faster." - cs major in my college.

Someone please confirm if this is a common opinion.

Typically every computer science major begins with either C C# C++ java or python , creating so much abstraction from the hardware which just loads your mind with questions that remain unanswered.When ever i program something i always think of how the under lying stuff is working.They never explain how and where software meets the hardware.Why are they keeping students away from the hardware. I think a cs graduate without knowing the underpinning of a computer should not be considered a cs graduate as opposed to being a software engineer a computer science major relates to everything that is a computer that includes the theoretical stuff and a little bit know how of computer hardware. Instead of teaching this stuff and assembly as a language in the first semester they teach you java or C++. Could not speculate on why this is so.

FFS what is the standard with dependency injection with Android. Is it dagger2 or kodein. Last 2 days googling about and it seems like it's dagger2 yet others say it's kodein. Kodein is newer I guess so less written about it. Seems like every 2 weeks it's something new. No wonder I can't pick this up. It changes faster than Trump can fricken tweet.

Like first mvc then mvp then mvvm then mvi what's next mve? 😵

So flustered. As last post I feel like giving up. Every time you try to learn some new "standard" creeps out from CS major ass crack. Is it the same for IOS. Maybe I should sell a kidney for a Mac book.

So I had an app idea a while back, but didn't do anything with because I couldn't tell if it was stupid or not. Maybe you all can help me with that.

My family was taking a trip to Washington D.C. I hadn't been there before, and wanted to know what it looked like, but when I searched for images of DC, all I got was images of the monuments there, and not the actual city.

So the app allows people to search and find realistic images of places (ie, Washington DC) that shows what that place really looks like, not just what it's famous for. And, now this isn't some major feature I just thought this would be convenient and cool for the user, a pop-up message of some sort that asks if they're planning a trip there, and takes them to a travel guide site, or a hotel room booking site, etc.

So what do you guys think? Yes? No? Maybe?

Also, I didn't list this as a collab because I don't know anything about actually developing an app (I mean, I'd love to learn I just don't have the time), just a bunch of high school level CS stuff.

used to hv a life, then i chose cs major

Hey so this isn't a rant, but just a question.
What books, tutorials, anything do you recommend for getting into AI? I'm going into my third year as a CS major and I'm just really curious.

Either self learning AI (maybe called machine learning) or game AI preferred

Thank you :)