(Years ago)

Me: I just found out, "Co-worker X" is making 15% more than me, despite him being a shitty developer and putting us 2 weeks behind schedule? Not fair. I did about 70% of the work on this project. I want a raise of 30% to make me feel appreciated at least.

Boss: Well, unlike you, he's already finished college and has a degree in software engineering. It's a company thing to base salaries on educational attainment.

Me: I have two weeks left on my contract, after that I'm gone. I hope his degree will help you meet the deadline.

* Product was delivered two months late, buggy as hell and the company faced penalties and other crap.

Sales Guy: Hey Man, you know what? you should go back to college and advance your knowledge in Software Engineering. This way you will be an expert in programming and handling the Servers.
Me: I started programming at the age of 17 and started handling servers by the age of 18. Can I ask you something if you don't mind?
Sale Guy: Yea sure I don't mind anything
Me: Get the fuck out of here

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

My college internet sucks!

It was totally fine upto when they blocked facebook and other social networking sites. 😕

Then they blocked youtube! 🤧 Ok, that was fine too!

But now they've blocked Stack Overflow! WTF!! 😭😭

This is the biggest punishment for any computer engineering student.

And there's no one to complain about it!😡😡 They've also blocked Ubuntu forums and several other helping sites! And they expect us to code without using these helpers. FML

So, today I was at my college library, working on an Haskell project that I have for my Functional Programming class. Library's packed and no seats are available, when the lady that works there passes behind me and says:
"There's people that want to study, if you're gonna be playing on your laptop please leave."
What? Excuse me? Are we in the 21st century or what?
How does a lady that works at a library, on an Engineering College, for more than 10 years, doesn't...
Screw it, I just laughed so hard and proceeded working.

Oh and by the way, first time posting on here!

me, sitting @ college, soldering together a charging cable

someone: oh wow you can do this stuff? i thought you were a computer scientist, not an engineer

me:...
me: yeah i need an engineering degree to wrap duct tape around cables

Software engineering class has been nothing but UML creation. I understand that their important but I just want to actually, ya know, engineer some software.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Not that i mean any disrespect but fuck you. Fuck you and all that you stand for. No seriously, just go hit a train and die.
You are a DBMS teacher in an Engineering college and teaching to the Computer Science students in the year 2017, where computers are fully capable of playing sports and simulating human brain.
And you want your students to write down all the sql queries along with their monolithic tabular output on paper..... With pen?
And you wont accept my printed out output?
Fuck you from the depths of my heart.
Go ahead and dont accept my project.
I dont need your fucking credits.

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

My teacher.

My 4th semester of college, I had a class about Software Engineering, the teacher started involving me in external projects, he actually taught me almost everything I know, now we work for the same company and he is my mentor and one of my dearest friends

Did anyone feel like IT is the thing in college not a lot of people really cared about?

Friend 1: "im going for chem engineering"

Everyone: *applaudes*

Friend 2: "im going for medicine"

Everyone: *applaudes*

Me: "im going for IT!"

Everyone: "uh, what about you Friend 4? What did you take?"

...

And i dont just mean it socially, the university doesnt pay much attention to us until they need something fixed or needs us to make something more convinient for them.

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 am a student. A Geospatial Engineering student. I made a demo Cordova app mapping incident spots on OSM., now my fellow undergrads think I can hack NSA, program a satellite, build all their dream websites and apps. The College Department wants me to lead an in-house photogrammetric programmable drone project. If they ask I'll say yes... yes I can! shit.😂

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

Friend of mine at college is struggling with his cpp class.

Have been helping this guy since forever with it, he is not a coder by any means nor does he display any sort of affinity or "talent" for it. But he does make up with intense dedication. Still he knows that he will not be pursuing a career in software engineering, this is just a class.

The thing is, he showed me a video of his class. The instructor is middle eastern with a thick accent. Accent so thick I need subtitles for this motherfucker.

He has learned more from me that he has at uni. And at my day job the interns say the same thing. I love teaching and far prefer it over working on projects.

This week we have a meeting with the head of the i.t dptmtn at school as nd I will try to pitch myself in as a faculty member by popular demand.

I would love to teach, i have experience in the field and learn a lot from going over shit as an instructor. I can make one go from wtf is JS used for to handling promises and writing Angular in days.

I really want to teach man.

I graduated last weekend. Walked in the commencement ceremony, took pictures, posted a !rant here, the whole 9 yards. Then what happens? I get an email from the dean of the engineering college at my university stating that my degree check was done incorrectly and that I am 3 credit-hours short of graduating, it is too late to sign up for an intersession course, and there are now 3 credit-hour courses offered as 8-weel courses. So here I am, with two Job interviews coming up, without my degree, wondering why the hell I found all this out A WEEK AFTER I "Graduated"! DA FUCK!!!!!

Hello everyone,
I am a french student and I was wondering if college sucks everywhere ...
This is my third college year and I have the feeling that I am wasting my time.

I am in a quite good engineering school but most of the programming courses suck because «teachers» are clueless about the course that they give.

I am not here to tell that «I am better than them blabla» but I just wanted to know if the quality of education has slightly dropped not only in France.

I am really interested in your opinion, feel free to debate in the comments :)

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,

And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?

What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.

And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.

Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.

Cool cs programmer are born today😖

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

I feel so empty.

I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.

2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.

I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.

Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.

I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.

To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?

If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.

I swear I almost had a nervous breakdown today.

Advisor at college has told me I won't be graduating until Feb 2019, I'll be 29 with a degree in IT and my minor in software engineering. I feel like I'm just playing catch up to the younger crowd who got there sooner.

On top of that all the entry level programming jobs I applied to have rejected me on the basis of not having my degree yet. They're impressed with my work but they want me out of school. I have to wait it out until I'm closer to graduating.

On good days when I code Java web applets love what I do and I wouldn't have it different, but on days like today I feel like shit and wonder if my degree was worth it, especially when I factor in that my degree only went up to pre-calc on the math end. (I'm thinking of majoring in a masters in CS as a way to makeup, maybe)

I'm frustrated and I feel the same kind of loneliness when I graduated HS. I know there's a light at the end but some days it's just hell.

I'm sure a lot of you have gone through this. Any ideas to destress?

Am I the only one that thinks it's extremely fucking stupid that the software engineering industry is simultaneously experiencing a "shortage of talent" and maintaining the same ATS that filters legitimate talent just because the resume doesn't fit keyword specifications?

We see it every day. People with years of experience that should never be allowed to touch important code. People with little to no experience that learn fast and perform well. Fuck years of experience being the only thing some recruiters see.

"We generally don't hire people with less than 3 years experience" shut your fucking mouth. Ridiculous. You hire people out of college, don't lie to my face.

Oh and don't even get me started on how many people fabricate their industry experience and get interviews from it. That's what happens when recruitment patterns fail to catch up to an industry that increasingly trains people better up front, and in shorter time periods, and values skills that ATS doesn't give a shit about.

Crazy idea: make job applications test problem solving competency instead of weeding out quality candidates.

Job searching is frustrating.

I wanna meet the dumbass that decided it was a good idea to teach scratch, basic, java, or even python as a first programming language course in college.

I’m so sick of seeing developers out of with shitty code structure and practices, and absolutely no understanding of what is going on behind the scenes of the IDE when you push run.

In order to be a good engineer you MUST know the basics, the root level, bare bones, bare metal shit.

I fear the future, less and less software engineers are comming out of colleges, the majority today is script kiddies, and folks with some basic java experience.

Who the hell is going to be writing firmware in the future then?

It’s insane the lack of foundational skills these students get in college. If they would get a strong foundation in C, and C++ they can easily attack at problem in any language, but missing the foundation, and relying on IDEs.. you will never be-able to go from a knowing only a high level languages and scripts to Lower level problems.

RIP the future of Software Engineering
Welcome to the hell full of script kiddies

As a freshman at a college, I am fascinated by the sheer lack of knowledge of Engineering Students in their fourth year. I had always thought I'd find more interesting people here. I'm disappointed.

I am a student in an Indian engineering college studying computer science currently working as an unpaid intern in a company that was registered one week before I joined and have windows installed on my laptop
I fucking hate my life 😭😭😭

Was logging in my student account to check whether the system actually registered my admission and here I go.

And this is not just some college. This is a website every engineering student shall use throughout the country.

Also this is not the first time this happened.

Let me recap everything i learned after graduating college with a computer science degree and entering the corporate world

---

1) College is a scam. Literally NOBODY EVER asked me on ANY interviews if i have a degree and if i had graduated university. Nobody cares. They treat me as if im a slave clown who didnt finish any school and thats how they view and treat everyone

2) By having a computer science degree, i do NOT have a privilege of getting hired, I do NOT have a privilege of getting more interviews, i do NOT get a privilege of having a higher salary, i do NOT get ANY benefits or privilege other than wasted time and brainwash.

3) Literally a senior technical software engineer told me on a technical interview "college is not meant to teach you anything useful or valuable, college is there just to teach you how to learn"

The FUCK? I was extremely shellshocked when i heard him tell me that in my face. I was in disbelief and too stunned to speak. if somebody told me that truth before i started college i would have never started college. I can do that on my own for free

4) I have applied to over 100s of interviews and nobody wanted to hire. Everyone wants a Google-Level Senior engineer in 2023 with 50+ years of experience and then pay him 600$ a month.

5) What is happening in this corporate world is absolutely fucking disgusting, sickening and immoral. This is no different than 1800s slavery. This is how modern day slavery looks like. And even when i accept working for 600$ a month i can barely afford to pay to live. I'd get like 50$ leftover every month if im lucky. This is SICKENING

6) "Engineering will make you rich" is a BULLSHIT saying that our parents and friends say. It is FAR from making you rich. You only get "rich" (but slave level rich) once you turn 40-50 years old. Is that success to you?

7) Engineering is so saturated that nobody appreciates this hard work anymore. You're a slave and you have to compete with other slaves by telling your master (employer) that you'll work for slave salary AND you'll work 10x more in exchange to earn 20x less. This is IMMORAL and DISGUSTING

I hate it when the college gives priority to project report than project. I fucking hate it. Line spacing, fancy borders, font size, institutional logo, who the fuck cares? All I care is what work is going on and what have we learnt from it. Fuck these faggots. For the past week I am more of a typist than an engineering student.

I got even angrier when the evaluators did not even open and go through the report.

for i in range(sys.maxsize()):
print(“fuck”)

When Google thinks your college is JAIL

So I have this "Software Engineering" course of this semester.

According to course curriculum we are supposed to taught "how to develop software for some real life problem".

Fast forward to this day. For FUCKING 8 WEEKS WE ARE GONNA JUST DO DOCUMENTATION(SRS, Problem description, features description etc) AND IMPLEMENT WHOLE PROJECT IN JUST ONE WEEK.

BURN IN HELL YOU FUCKING SHIT PROFESSOR....

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

So another story about college and stupid team assignments that I have to be responsible for dealing with.

So we had an assignment in operating systems 1 course, it was about memory management and we are a team of 3. Then came the time when we should discuss this assignment with the TA and that day I had to stay all night finishing a project in software engineering (literally giving us a description of a big project because that's what the course teaches And I had to finish it in one all nighter alone because my teammates just gave up).

When the discussion time came I was really tired and then the TA asks me something really simple and I say it but then she tells me that I'm wrong so I wondered a bit and then said no what I said was right! She then asks my teammate (who we are supposed to be good friends) "did he say the right thing?" And his answer is a definitive "NO he's wrong" and then he starts to say the right answer which I swear I said the same but in a different way so I start to say again that I was right and say that I said that just a different way and she took that as an insult and said that I'm shouting at her and being disrespectful to her.

When we finished I asked my friend if he heard me say it wrong and he said "I'm sorry but I didn't even hear what you said and I was afraid" WHAT THE FUCK, he just said that I was wrong to please her and make her feel like she is right and I had to be the wrong one even though I said it right but NOoo her pride is more important

All this was last semester and the second semester just started today and I go into operating system 2 and guess what? The TA got her doctorate and is now the professor for OS 2 when she doesn't even understand anything.

Really FUCK the academic system it feels like it is a grind more than actually gaining mastery of a subject.

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

> be me
> studying 1.5 years liberal arts stuff and general education class at community college
> transfer to a 4 year university.
> realize I need a major
> Realize I also I wanted to 9ne day have a family.
> realize family would need money
> "struggling actor" not a great choice
> pray about what I should be doing
> get distinct impression that instead of attending the session on majors at the college of fine and performance arts to go to session with the college of Science and engineering.
> hear pitch for computer science.
> signup for introduction to programming taught with c++.
> A couple semesters down the line take 3 classes all at once Discrete Math 1, Linear Algebra, and database design and administration.
> around week 6 realize that all 3 classes revolved around sets and set logic and set math.
> realize rdbs's are "applied" set math and that Each class a little more "applied" than the former.
> Be genius at SQL and set math
> havereally smart database teacher mentored me
> get introduced to the recruiter at the career fair.
> get interviews
> get flown out for 2md interview
> get internship
> do work, and get project back under budget
> a job offer
> finish senior year
> start as a "real" developer supporting business data and analytics.
> ???
> profit.

Parents to college watchman - "Is this a good college?"
Watchman - "Probably the best. I completed my engineering here and got campus placement."

Mechanical engineering at my college loved coding

He did a 3 month python course ended up getting a full time job as a developer at a reputed company

Have the will and anything is possible

Maybe it's just cause I fucking hate the elitism in the engineering college and every engineer I've met, but why do devs want to be called engineers? I'm a programmer, a developer, a coder, fucking anything rather than an engineer.
I associate that word with know-nothing "book-smart" fuckwads who think they're better than everyone, even someone doing the same thing without their useless degree.

300 fucking people.

and only 120 are allowed to study SOFTWARE ENGINEERING while everyone else can go fuck themselves in a COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLEGE

why is this restricted so much

why such a small amount of people are allowed to study SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

are you telling me i sacrificed my time and wasted 2 years of my life on college because i wanted to study SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, just so i can go fuck myself after 2 years?

someone explain this to me

this is unacceptable

!rant
Oh I forgot to tell y'all that I've got a research internship at IIT Indore for these summers

IIT is India's Governmental Engineering college and is highly respectable

I know a few people here who study at IITs, but Yay! I got a nice and good internship which will actually tell me how to proceed in research and not do a mess of shit like I did last year's summer holidays and also made so bad of a relation with one of my professor that I can't even look in his eyes whenever he is nearby me
(Although I had to pay for this internship. New IITs need the intern to pay.)

Wish me luck guys

BTW more good news *might* be coming up

I picked up an HTML book for kids when I was about 11. I didn't code again until college. I started as chemical engineering, but that wasn't really my thing.

I decided to take a computer science class and loved every bit of it, so I switched my major to computer engineering. I also started learning LAMP stack development in my spare time.

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!

I have a junior friend living in same building where I used to live. I used to help him in small doubts related to college and in some random stuff.

I once typed an application in a language which does not have its fonts in ms word by default. I used Google typing tools and Google docs to type and format it. I even taught him the process which is easy to understand.

Out of blue, after few years, this SOB pings me today and asks same thing to do again since it's urgent. I told him that I am middle of something and told him to use same tools as I used and give it a try. This fucker says he forgot how to do it. Well no problems, I told him how to do it and I will not be able to do it for him right now.
He said then try doing it after coming back to home.

Mind you that he is an engineering student.
You asshole, if it is so much urgent then use your brain and figure out this small thing yourself. If you can wait till I come back home then in which fucking way it's urgent? Go fuck yourself. I am done with your shitty attitude and on next offense you are going on my block list.

This is PART 2/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering course years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 6: After the previous drama MT built the groundwork for the project without allowing us to intervene for a week. When he finally disclosed his code he gave us tasks and I was stuck unable to run the new project, due to the friction with MT I asked SR for help which took a couple of days. MT accused us of not wanting to work and claimed he’d just do everything himself. I continued working on the task improving MT’s code and committed the work, which surprised MT and told me I didn’t have to do it. He ended up complimenting my code and complained less about me as a result.

Rant 7: MT kept giving SR flak for not working and took him out of the repo, which I promptly forked just in case he tried anything scummy. SR was indeed working on certain things, but he wasn’t listening to MT’s demands, there was no team coordination. I had to act as a proxy and push some of SR’s changes myself while informing him of the state of things.

Rant 8: When MT finally added SR back and some of the tasks were cleared up, FT didn’t cooperate. She seemed to have zero initiative and always relied on MT to tell her what to do, which didn’t include coordinating with SR to get the front-end templates running. I tried getting them in a group chat but it didn’t work, she just ignored him.

I learned a few things from that.
1. No matter how smart or experienced someone may seem, sometimes people are just petty or take things too personally.
2. Top students are sometimes too focused on their grades and disregard depth of knowledge and work quality.
3. A bad team at college can somehow make something acceptable if everyone works on things that add some kind of value.

turned down software engineering job offers after college because I thought it be a good to take a temporary position as a controls engineer so I could pay off student loans faster.

realizing how big of mistake it was. working long hours on uninteresting tasks. I just want to code for a living.

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

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.

aagh fuck college subjects. over my last 4 years and 7 sems in college, i must have said this many times : fuck college subjects. But Later i realize that if not anything, they are useful in government/private exams and interviews.

But Human computer Interaction? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SUBJECT???
This has a human in it, a comp in it, and interaction in it: sounds like a cool subject to gain some robotics/ai designing info. But its syllabus, and the info available on the net , is worse than that weird alienoid hentai porn you watched one night( I know you did).

Like, here is a para from the research paper am reading, try to figure out even if its english is correct or not:
============================
Looking back over the history of HCI publications, we can see how our community has broadened intellectually from its original roots in engineering research and, later, cognitive science. The official title of
the central conference in HCI is “Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems” even though we usually call it “CHI”. Human factors for interaction originated in the desire to evaluate whether pilots
could make error-free use of the increasingly complex control systems of their planes under normal conditions and under conditions of stress. It was, in origin, a-theoretic and entirely pragmatic. The conference and field still reflects these roots not only in its name but also in the occasional use of simple performance metrics.

However, as Grudin (2005) documents, CHI is more dominated by a second wave brought by the cognitive revolution. HCI adopted its own amalgam of cognitive science ideas centrally captured in Card, Moran & Newell (1983), oriented around the idea that human information processing is deeply analogous to computational signal processing, and that the primary computer-human interaction task is enabling communication between the machine and the person. This cognitive-revolution-influenced approach to humans and technology is what we usually think of when we refer to the HCI field, and particularly that represented at the CHI conference. As we will argue below, this central idea has deeply informed the ways our field conceives of design and evaluation.

The value of the space opened up by these two paradigms is undeniable. Yet one consequence of the dominance of these two paradigms is the difficulty of addressing the phenomena that these paradigms mark as marginal.

=============================

Should I switch from Electrical Engineering to Comp Sci?

I am about to start my second semester at college. I took programming 101 and realized I might like coding more than engineering. All the classes I have taken are inside the Comp Sci. Courses in my university so I would not be losing time if I switch now.
Also I started messing around with Android Studio with some friends and that made me realize how easy comparison it is to make a good portfolio and have sideprojects.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Hey all. I'm a fresh college grad with a bachelor's in Software Engineering minor in math. I'm applying to countless jobs with little to no luck hearing back. Any tips from you all? Much appreciated!!

I got accepted into the University of Washington BS Computer Science & Software Engineering program today! It's been a long road since starting ITT Tech 3 years agofor a BAS in SDEV, it closing on me, starting all the way over at community college, maintaining a 4.0, and now a bootcamper at Coding Dojo. Now only at least 2 more years to go! 😁🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃😩

What would be the best "hot"/upcoming languages for a final year college project?

The project will focus on reverse engineering.

Basic Example: Intercepting signals from products such as a toy helicopters/drones/etc, reverse engineer the signals and try gain control of the device from that.

That's just a very basic function and there will be much more to it, but I'm struggling to decide on a language to pursue hand-in-hand with this project!

I hear Rust, Go, Julia and co being tossed around a lot.

Any suggestions would be helpful!

Cheers

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

I'm starting college soon for Computer Science and Engineering. Any advice on how to learn as much as I can in the classroom setting? Everything I know now I've had to piece together.

Reason to hate my D grade engineering college.

1st lecture of web development.
(Syllabus html,css,PHP)

Expectation : at least teacher will introduce fucking web development technologies.
Reality:
Teacher=> look I don't know anything about PHP so learn from web. I will give you internal marks just submit assignment on time.
😅
Btw it is not story.

Most of the faculty on my college's IT engineering department aren't exactly adept with Linux, despite the fact that 10/12 labs in our building run on Ubuntu.

Last week, a really great professor (who doesn't take any classes I can attend) from the Electronics and Communications department and I wrote some bash scripts to automate updates and so on, staying back after college until late evening to try to get the PCs updated.

We'll be trying to use SSH to update as many computers as we can remotely, and trying to learn to use Cron to automate the whole updating deal.
I'm learning this stuff on the side, since it's not on my syllabus at all, and the professor isn't even related to the departments that run the labs usually.

We're not getting anything for doing this, the head of my department (who has it in for me) has no idea about this, and nobody else is bothered enough to learn either.

Completed 1 year of experience in web designing and development today...
I haven't even passed out yet. I am still in 4th year computer engineering....
Hands on experience teaches me more than college lectures....

Is it bad that even though I am doing computer science in college I still feel like I am missing a lot of knowledge? Like I’ll come out of college without knowing things that people with information technology will know or things that people with computer engineering will know.

I feel like all the job descriptions out there want me to be a combination of CS, IT and CE.

I want to rant about my college.
I studied computer engineering, we spent 5 years studying circuits, diodes, CPUs etc ..
It's cool and all but like in my country we don't have a single computer's manufacturing company and all computer engineering students work in software development. But they didn't teach us a single usfel thing for work! We only studied Java and C++, nothing more and our professors claim that you guys can learn software development from the internet.
Our professors whom they don't even know how to debug a code not to mention how to full screen a power point presentation.
My point is college is trash.

We have been at a university of applied sciences today with our class.
It was kind of ok. I did expect more surprising things there. The whole building was smaller than our college (not the same as in the US). The rooms, where profs tell you things with a series of rows of seats, were dirty and pretty much used to the point that the seats are about to break easily.
I was expecting the university to be kind of the same as the universities you see in the movies lol.
It could have at least been bigger than our college and more "modern" than our school.
[...]
Anyways, let us get to the point here.
We were first in the foyer and afterwards in their main lecture hall.
We were introduced to the day's plans by a team of engaged students from different study programs and the president of the professors. Yada yada yada.
We got the full program in each room and each individual time span filled with study programs on a sheet of paper.
I did select pharmacy, media production, architecture, data science, applied computer science, computer engineering, mechanical engineering and future energies.
Pharmacy and data science were the most interesting study programs to me. I have asked one of the professors if deep learning was a topic for bachelor students, as well.
He said that that is only the usual case for people who got a promotion.
As an example he told me that yesterday he was at a conference hall with 10.000 people in which he gave a talk about deep learning. "Most of them were professors" he said. "Since this study program is new, it might change in a few years" he added to his conversation.

It is quite hard having to decide now.
Geo informatics and Aerospace Engineering did sound interesting, too.
There are a lot of things I would like to study at the same time haha.

Idk if I should just pick mechanical engineering first and add one or two after it to it. But that would take a lot of time. Geez.

Reading a couple rants from students and teachers lately, brought back to my mind a memory from the first lesson in my Software Engineering course when I was in college.
Teacher entered the room like he was the king of the world, turned around facing the students and started his intro speech:
"my name is {name} bla bla bla I will teach you software engineering bla bla bla let's point out one important thing: In your life you have written how many lines of code for a software? 10? 100? If you have NEVER written at least 1,000,000 lines of code for a program, you're not a developer. Now let's start talking about waterfall, endless specification requirements and meetings..."

Me 😐
And that was the moment I left the room moonwalking

MY GENETIC ALGORITHMS INVESTIGATION PROJECT. I WANTED TO RANT ABOUT THAT SO THIS WEEKLY RANT IS PERFECT. I can't write the whole rant rn, stay tuned.

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

Any programmers/software engineers/developers here that studied I.T. or Computer Engineering instead of CS in college?

Job hunting is hard!

I have over 10 years experience in software engineering. I do mostly full stack, so I can say I'm a jack of all trades and a language agnostic. I'd say I'm a good software engineer and will be able to tackle any task I've been assigned to. Having said that, my confidence in finding a new role is at an all time low.

I've been job hunting for 3-4 months now and so far I've only had 1 interview and it was unsuccessful. Now have been invited to a first round interview for another company (first of many rounds). It's going to involve many technical challenges like coding, algorithms and data structure and system designs.

In general I've had hardly any interviews (about 6-7 in total in my whole career). Due to my lack of interview experience, I've been getting anxiety especially now that the job market is tougher than it has ever been.

Firstly, how do you guys prepare, if at all? I feel like many of these interviews require you to be good at interviews, almost like an exam. If these questions were presented to me when I first came out of college, I would've had a better chance.

Secondly, how do you take rejections? I didn't know how painful it was to get rejected, regardless of how much I wanted the role.

I've been fortunate enough to still have my current job, but because of that I don't really have much time, nor the mental energy to study for interviews.

Apologies I'm advanced for poor grammar, I'm writing this on the train.

Saw an ad on a news/media website looking for front end developers.

Fresh out of Practical Engineering college, which is basically a rapid 2 years teaching academy, I knew the manager previously and applied for the job.
In my standards I failed the "interview" miserably, but nevertheless they still took me under their wings and taught me everything.

1 year later, I'm the lead web and android dev and currently learning AWS and iOS.

it's a fun experience and the unexpected responsibilities have taught me alot.

So my first rant is about my current job. I got out of college after a year doing basic research on a SBIR/NASA grant. Nothing too interesting but great entry-level experience on sub-sustenance wages based on the cost of living in 1971.. And finally got that great offer to work with an IoT company for a living wage, with a chance to really flex my hard earned skills, and maybe even the ability to afford medical insurance while paying my rent on time!

They said 'network & software engineering', but my only projects are graphic design for sales copy with a guy who thinks FourSquare is a website hosting service.
They said 'full time', but in reality it isn't.
They said $50k a year, but apparently their mouths wrote a check that they don't have bank to cash.
The guy who approves my projects is taking a vacation because of the coronavirus panic and now I won't get paid for a week.
They seem like nice folks, but also a bit irresponsible and it looks like I fell for a bait-and-switch.
Now I'm trying to find a way of spinning off this experience into something that doesn't look like a lame free-lance graphic design gig while looking for better paying work.

if (!ethical) { alert("fml"); }

I joined engineering to learn a lot of things and build cool stuff with other classmates and lecturers. But the college,universty and all students were only focused on grades, literally no one wants to learn anything , they just memorize the information , write it in exam and forget by next semester. Lot of students werent even able to build a demo web application projects , they just borrow it from their seniors,buy it or anyway except building by themselves.

I somehow didnt like this process and was always opposed to the process, i didnt study last night for many exams , just wrote what i knew , i was able to pass most of the exams , but some failed too may be because i wasnt that good at that subject or the valuator needs answer as exactly as in his book. I went on to learn it all by myself , ignoring my grades , as it takes lot of time to maintain grades, and is way too less exciting than programming.

I m building an interesting project for my final year and have worked as freelancer to develop and implement few web and mobile applications.

Now, at the end of the college, they have the job , i have only have skills.

I even feel that if that kind of guys can get selected there, then i should not be there.

At first i was told to go to college BY PEOPLE WITH NO COLLEGE because i wouldnt be able to find a job without degree

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i sacrificed my life for school

Then later i found out PEOPLE WHO FINISHED COLLEGE told me i just need knowledge in order to be hired, and turns out degree is unimportant

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i studied and worked on practical projects and gained knowledge

Now when I try to get hired, they admitted that i am able to complete complex projects and i know how to solve the problems even if i see them for the first time. But they rejected me because "im not sure why the car leaks oil".

I have to understand and know what the whole framework is doing under the hood, how everything works, how dependency injection works under the hood, SOLID principles under the hood, decorators how they work under the hood etc.

So now it turns out
- sacrificing life for school is not enough
- sacrificing life for degree is not enough
- sacrificing life for learning and gaining knowledge is not enough
- now the new trend is i have to know not only how to drive a car like a professional formula F1 driver, i also have to be a mechanic and know how to fix the car if it breaks.

MATRIX IS A BIG FAT BULLSHIT AND A LIE.

I feel like they're looking for a senior developer knowledge to pay him junior developer salary

WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?

I sacrificed 10 days of my life for their bullshit to build this project from scratch as a technical interview. They never said congrats on all the parts that were built right, but only complained about the small portion of bugs i didnt have time to fix.

ALL OF THIS FOR A SALARY OF $1500/MONTH THAT I ASKED. THATS LESS THAN 20,000$ A YEAR. THEY EITHER GAVE ME AN OPTION TO WORK FOR WAY LESS (500-600$/month) OR CALL THEM BACK IN A FEW MONTHS.

I JUST FINISHED COLLEGE AND THEY EXPECT ME TO HAVE 20 YEARS OF SENIOR DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE.

WTF IS THIS SLAVERY BULLSHIT?

HAVING A 500$/MONTH AS ENGINEERING SALARY WITH A DEGREE IS BELITTLING OF THIS JOB.

NO I DONT LIVE IN INDIA I LIVE IN SERBIA. MY DOG IS SICK AND IT COSTS 100$ A DAY JUST FOR HIS TREATMENT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE WITH A SLAVE SALARY IN THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

We have people from all different types of backgrounds here on DevRant, and I feel like lots of us just kind of spontaneously discovered the dev world without really planning on it.

That makes me wonder, what did you major in during college, and is it related to what you're doing now? Did you major is Computer Science/Software Engineering/Web Development, or something completely different?

I double-majored in Algebraic Geometry and Astrophysics, and while my math background does come in handy as a developer, I'm very rarely applying what I actually specialized in to my dev work

A previous rant made me start doubting my choices.

I just graduated from college (but college here is probably not what you call college. You choose whether you do one more year and gain the 'x technician' certificate or you do two years and get the 'practical engineer' degree)

Hope you understand it.

Anyway, so I continued 1 year (I skipped 1 year so it's like I did the whole two years) and I have a practical engineer degree in electronics.

I love programming and really want to work in the field but (since I know nothing about the market) I don't even know if I'll get a job without going to university and getting a degree (which I want to get, I want to learn Software Engineering though, not CS)

So now to my question, do you guys truly think getting a degree will be a waste of my time?

tl;dr I want to get a Software Engineer degree, but a lot of posts say it's a waste of time. Who agrees and who doesn't?

All is see is people ranting about college lectures/classes , am I the only one who learns in most of my classes?

Don't have a cs degree, when I was in college I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I got an bachelor's in math figuring that would open a lot of doors. Did a boot camp after college to test the waters and found out i had a real passion for engineering. 2 years later I am teaching people with Masters in cs how to get shit done at my job. Morale of the story, your education in the theoretical doesn't mean shit when it's time to get practical work done.

I'm about to interview for a Support Desk position with a year left in college. Studying software engineering, is this a bad job for me? As I get closer to my graduation, I'm going to apply for developer positions, but would this experience hurt me more than help?

Haven't had any luck trying to find a developer internship. Live in Atlanta.

I have working for software engineering for the past 8 years without any degree at all. However, in my latest job interviews one of the things I mainly lacked was understanding and applying the algorithmic concepts. As I hadn't maths since I left college, what would you recommend me?

I was looking for some kind of a course (it is always better when you have someone with whom you can discuss with), but such a specific one doesn't seem to exist in Portugal, and taking an entire degree because of algorithms is not an option to me.

Ideas?

PS: I am currently working, however I do understand that a new algorithmic thinking would help me in my daily job.

In India you learn c and c++ languages as beginners at first year of your college in diploma or engineering and you learn python at end of your engineering like 4th year for engineering and for diploma it's 3+3 means at 6th year. Here if you really want to be something you must self-learn.

Half of the courses we had in our college were about electronics. Except Microprocessors and Transistors, it's not relevant.
We even had chemistry and engineering drawing. So we essentially wasted more than half of our time.

Besides languages, weren't taught anything about real world software development.

Nothing about how to work with an existing code base, version control, design patterns, system design, creating a website, debugging, functional programming, scalability, reliability.

The industry should be involved in setting the syllabus and also contributing part time teachers.

So this is something that happened in the first year at college.
I was at one of the top 50 engineering colleges in my country. To get admission here one needs to get a good score in the qualifying exams.
Now we had a cs related course in the first year which covered basic programming and coding concepts.
So in the first practical session we had to just write a hello world program in C.
The guy next to me for this session was the class topper who had secured the highest marks in the qualifying exams.
Now, as most of us know that program has a line that is:
printf("Hello World!"); or a variant of this.
This guy gets stuck while writing this line, so I ask him if I can help him.
He turns to me and said, " Man, I'm trying to get this comma to go up but it's not working"
Extremely confused I look at his terminal, only to realize that he was pressing shift+, and trying to get the " sign.
That guy went on to finish with a 4.0 gpa and is currently doing his masters.
Although hilarious, this serves as a very good lesson to all the beginners out here.
If you learn from your mistakes and improve you can definitely succeed in your life!
Just remember to actually look at the full keyboard though!

!Rant but a question :)

So, I'm in college learning software engineering and kind of don't see the point of try-harding. I have always been very good at learning so I only started studying late high-school because grades were important for collage entrance. But now that I'm here and my grades have all been very good (15/20 in the worst cases), I'm not motivated to go the mile further, specially because I don't have friends to compete with (or enemies for that matter :P).

How do you developers motivate yourselves?

Damn lots of you knew this shit before turning of age.
I didn't code a single line until I went to college.
I tried to, but it was just too fucking complicated and I didn't understand a thing. Tried to grasp how to use some tools like Unity or an Adventure Maker of sorts and something called Flix for Flash games. Didn't understand shit.
I decided to study systems engineering due to a career aptitude test I took hoping somehow that way I could learn sthg.
First thing I was taught was bash.
When I realised I already knew enough to code a whole text adventure from scratch with such a simple language I felt really hyped.
Always loved text and graphic adventures.
Afterwards I was taught the Z80 assembly language and how CPU registers worked and it blew my fucking mind.
That was the first half-year.
Then I was taught C. And boy was it hard. Didn't get how memory was being handled until the very end.
I happened to be one of the few passing a stupidly complicated semifinal test with triple indirection pointers.
That felt goood.
Learning other languages afterwards was a piece of cake. C#, Java, X86 assembly, C++...
It was a hard door to open. Fucking heavy. But now nothing seems black magic anymore and boy isn't that something to be proud of! :D

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

I'm currently pursuing engineering in an Indian engineering college. Needless to say the college Curriculum isn't going to take me places.
I like programming and I feel I'm pretty good at it. So I need tips as to what I need to do apart from college to pursue programming.
I have recently started learning Android development and web development in the college.
So any tips from devs would be great!

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.

Just started my new college education (going for embedded systems engineering) and we found out we don't have any holidays except for christmas.
No biggie, can live with that.

However, we just got a project which we need to pass to continue to the second year and of course it's a fucking group project.

Guess what, one of the asshats had a holiday planned for a while, so he'll be out somewhere in Africa while the rest build stuff for a week. 1 week on a 3 week project... Amazing.

So I’m heading off to college soon, any tips for diving into robotics engineering or just college life in general?

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

!rant
So i'm currently an IGCSE student, and i learn programming as a hobby, but this year is the graduation year and i took all the subjects necessary for The Faculty of Computer Science, but i wanted some advice from the people working in this field, so is it a great job with good income? and are thier many job oppurtinities out there on the market? And finally which is better Software engineering or CS?
Thanks for your time.

!rant

Question to the devs that hire.
Would you hire a developer with the qualifications:
- knows multiple programming languages (can be any but knows them well)
- has worked the past 6 years in the field however worked during his school life.
- started of career in web development and worked with high end clients, (big corps, businesses, celebs)
- does not have a CS or Engineering Degree (has a different degree that is remotely related)
- has failed his A Level exams (pre-college, high school board exams by Cambridge) (not that this matters)

Disclaimer: This is not about me. I was in an argument with my extended family about the importance of grade school education in work. My family consists of Teachers and School Administrators entirely. The above point all define me and I was successful enough to earn more than what my family does early on when joining college. I did however fail my alevels only to get a scholarship in a great University for my field.

A few years ago, while in college, a friend and I were working on a engine as a side project to build experience. 25% of the goals completed and he begins making excuses to not work anymore. I continues working on it and when the project was "competed", I showed it to the head of the department at the college where I was offered a job as a professor and sold the engine for 20k to the department of engineering.

The dude came back claiming recognition and compensation for his effort I told him sure.

When we met, I showed him legal paper stating the engine was patented under my name and I was the only owner.

In reality, I wanted to meet with him to breath his ass then show him the paper but I felt that would be too evil.

I was pretty mad that he came back after leaving but I can't hold good for nothing people.

No, they didn't supported and infact are source of major problems in my dev and college career. Just granpa and dad, they wanted me to go for government jobs. Whenever they saw me with laptop they will say things like, you are ruining your future, this won't be asked in exams etc. They are good at manipulation too and sadly they won. Forced me to take civil engineering as it makes you eligible for most government jobs. I didn't knew what was going on my mind back then, and why i listened to such peices of shits. Real bad decision.

I can't help but stress out about finding work in development. I just want an internship / entry level summer position to put myself in a better position for post college and to explore and learn in new environments. But it seems like my best chance for scoring that internship is building a solid portfolio or experience, something that I haven't had time to do..

I wrote my first line of code (that wasn't HTML or CSS) when I got to college. Since then almost all my time has gone into my cs engineering curriculum and working a real shitty blue collar job during breaks (for 4 years now) because Im broke and got denied by the 20+ positions I applied for. I can't really do anything with the code I wrote for my schoolwork because I can get fucked if I post it anywhere or share it. I have loads of ideas, but am worried that they are too big to do while maintaining my GPA and scholarships. It sucks too because I am a quick learner, and would even venture to call myself good at what I do.

So since I have hardly been able to pursue any independent studies, I haven't been able to really explore the field, so I don't even know what to areas i need to focus on to make myself a better candidate. So basically I'm broke, don't have shit for pet projects, don't know what I want to do with my life, and can probably expect to work like a dog next summer too because I've heard most companies hire for the summer in the fall.

I don't write this because I feel bad for myself. I write this because it's likely that most people here have been in a similar situation. I also don't like to make excuses for myself like I have been doing. Any advice folks? What should I be doing differently?

I don't have a cs degree (my degree is in aerospace engineering). However, I think the question is valid for any degree. The answer depends on the field. When sitting in on interviews over the years, the type of degree for programming jobs never seemed that important if there were experience involved. So, if the job description required 2 yrs exp. in X, then that experience trumped the degree type. If the job was for a junior dev right out of college, then degree type becomes one of the most important factors. So, for that first job, it's important that you've got a degree (any degree) because it shows that you can accomplish that chunk of work. Having a cs degree at that point does provide a distinct advantage over those with medieval romantic french poetry degrees. That's the game, and don't fret if 95% of the material you study in college you never use again. The point of studying it wasn't to use it immediately (go learn a trade if that's your bent), it was to both test you and to expose you to specialties that you might want to do later.

I was in junior college working on a mechanical engineering degree taking Calculus 1, some other classes, and a beginner level C programming class.

I decided being a ME wasn't for me as I couldn't handle the math, but the programming was a lot of fun. I ended up dropping Cal 1 and changing majors only to find out that I needed to transfer to a 4 year school to continue on the developer track. A few years later in December of 2013 I graduated with my BS in Computer Information Systems and a couple of years after that I had a great job as a dev.

Since most of you are working in IT , Communication and related fields, what advice can you give to a student like me who has just began studying Computer Science Engineering ...I mean how should I began, what to do next and get myself placed in a good company.

Talking about myself I have started learning C language and have learnt about basics, pointers, memory allocation, not yet started with data structures and algorithms

I have just done HTML and basic CSS , have understanding of MySQL and know a little bit about flask and Jinja framework in python.

If you could share your experiences, like what you felt at this stage what you do and how you do....how you got placed...what should I do different to cope with the growing competition....

Look I know this place is not for this bullshit but.... my seniors are egocentric bastards, my batchmates don't give a shit about CS , and being a student of tier-3 state government college in India, professors don't care......so I really appreciate if you guys can come forward, and especially Indian guys.

!rant

Looking for some guidance on a final year college research project:

I was going to look into hacking drones/toy helicopters/those Fitbit watch things or whatnot, but I'm not sure if it would go down well! Some technologies I'm looking to explore through this project include reverse engineering, machine learning and container technologies (docker, rkt) if that helps?

Am I along the right lines or should I take a different approach with different topics? If so, an update on what's "hot" or upcoming at the moment would be helpful.

Cheers!

Good morning devRant community, so currently im on my early morning commute to College, and it got me thinking.

So I’m very passionate about programming but i also love playing around with the Stock Markets, Are there Software Engineering positions which work with the markets? I’ve been thinking its called a “Quant” but im not too sure, Also does anyone have any possible experience within the field? What it takes to get in etc?.

I highly appreciate it! Hope you have an amazing day/night. :-)

Working on a CS370 (Software Engineering) project with 5 people; 2 of which feel like their time is more important than everyone else's so when we all meet as a group to go over presentations, documentation and other things we need to do as a group, they silently sit alone working on bits of code they should have done previously. Then when we can't get docs done and handed in on time, one of the two decides to spam our group chat at 2am when 2 of us are sleeping because we work in the morning, one of us is sleeping because of morning classes and the last one is doing god knows what. Like, I'm sorry. But failure to do your shit on time does not constitute an emergency on my shit. All of our weekly peer reviews reflect on how no matter what we say to these two; they refuse to work as a team.
!rant, more like dev hint
In a team, your time is not more important than team time. You can do things on your time whenever you want; but unless your entire team shares your schedule, team time might be a rare commodity and should be used as such.

Desperately need advice from devs in India...
asking this here since really stressed about this and don't know who to ask to...
I am an engineering student from Bangalore, India from a basically no name college...
I have been coding for 2 years now, web stuff, primarily rails and js...
i have worked with handful of startups, done internships, and am working on my own projects which i will launch soon...
Lately my college has made it a mission to make my life hell even though i always perform well academically...it has gotten to a point where I am not able to work or learn anymore...
I wanted to ask what consequence my career will face if I drop out ?
I believe lack of a graduation degree will make me not eligible for many jobs...please suggest what I should do...

College has been rough, especially when I've been having my hand held through 12 years. More stuff to learn, to do; and my life hasn't been great.

It's official that I'm following Chemical Engineering, specifically Food Engineering major (or whatever the heck it's called). I still code but I'm not sure if I'm gonna get to the level of the properly-trained folks. Heck I don't even know DFS and BFS and they seem important.

So yea, I'm not dead, just on life support. What did I miss on dR since July guys?

Is there any way to make software engineering an interesting subject, instead of just theory that we have to study as an undergraduate student?

Conducting a fun based coding event “Tasquila” in national level tech fest “Pleiades” conducted every year at B.V.B college of engineering and technology Hubballi-580031, Karnataka, India and event is gonna be on 22nd or 23rd of March ... looking out for participants and sponsors... any help would be appreciated... 😄😄

Hey devRant community, I’d really like some suggestions/advice for something I’m going through.

I’ve always wanted to go abroad to work/travel and experience new things and I feel that I can do all of that by pursuing masters but I am not fully sure about the specific area in CS which I’d like to study more, I do have an interest in A.I but I’d like to explore other things as well. I like Software engineering and would love to do some internships and probably a job before applying for masters but college ends in 6 months and I’m still not sure about this. I also want to get better at Software Engineering interviews as I’m avg when it comes to data structures and algorithms. Any help here will be appreciated.

Hey devRant community, I’d really like some suggestions/advice for something I’m going through.

I’ve always wanted to go abroad to work/travel and experience new things and I feel that I can do all of that by pursuing masters but I am not fully sure about the specific area in CS which I’d like to study more, I do have an interest in A.I but I’d like to explore other things as well. I like Software engineering and would love to do some internships and probably a job before applying for masters but college ends in 6 months and I’m still not sure about this. I also want to get better at Software Engineering interviews as I’m avg when it comes to data structures and algorithms. Any help here will be appreciated.

Been applying with a couple of colleges for a certificate course on data management and the admissions coordinator is being a complete fuck! Called and left a message to which he offered to arrange a phone call if I felt like I needed it (I didn't at the time) and so I politely ended that particular convo by saying "thank you and I'll be sure to send any questions your way" (I think a gesture of good faith considering he did offer a phone call).

I sent him a couple questions the day after asking politely application dates and then another the next day (he hadn't replied at that point, but I suppose it's better to show interest than not, especially since I'm entering into this with not - a - engineering /computer science background) about whether a campus tour is available and also about funding. And the guy just hasn't replied! It's been two full days now and I'm pretty sure that's not exactly kosher for a program coordinator to do. Like was I being too persistent with the emails (3 in total) instead of just waiting it out in the dark? (the issue is I'd need to wait until the next cohort so May of next year instead of January so I'm in a rush!)

It doesn't help that it turns out that the program coordinator is a professor at the college 🤔 so I think maybe he's got some big d*** issues

Didn't happen to me, but to a friend. It was freshman year of college and we were taking an intro engineering course where we had to take apart an old camera and replace some gear in the camera with one we designed ourselves to change the shutter speed. We were split into groups of 3 and had to submit our first lab report detailing our design plan by week 2 into the quarter. Right before the due date, one of the kids in my friends group DROPS OUT OF COLLEGE because he thought the project (2 weeks in) was too hard, leaving my friend and her partner to finish his third of the report that he didn't do. They didn't even get a third partner for the remainder or the class. Two people had to bear the work of a quarters worth of assignments meant for groups of 3. Thankfully they were able to do everything and got a passing grade in the end.

My family got our first computer when I was in the 1st grade and I really liked it a lot.

After some years I saw someone code and I was like "What's that?". After they explained me what they were doing I was totally hyped and started searching tutorial videos on how to do simple stuff on VB (this was in my 7th grade, I believe).

By the end of my 8th grade I was introduced to a Computer Engineer that lent me a RoR book and tried to teach me the basics.
(Fun fact: around this time I was doing a Habbo clone server with a friend of mine so that we could play with our friends without all the other people poking around).

In high school I took a Computer Technician course where I learnt stuff like VB, C#, PHP, MySQL, some basic CSS/HTML plus some hardware fundamentals.

After that course I tried to enter college and I failed on my first try, so I took a gap year were I worked as a dev for my family's computer repair shop. It was really a good experience to have time for myself while working on what I loved.

Now I'm on the 2nd year of a Bachelor in Computer Engineering (It's more about software than hardware actually), currently working with Java, C, IA-32 Assembly and PL/SQL. My goal is to get a Masters in Software Engineering after it.

College Major: Civil Engineering
Minor: Web development(Frontend)