How much influence does luck have on success in the Computer Science field, especially for students graduating from top universities like Georgia Tech? #luck #ComputerScience #careeroutcomes #effort #hardwork
### Importance of Luck in Computer Science Career
– As a Georgia Tech student about to graduate and pursue a one-year master’s program, luck could be a significant factor in your career success.
– You’ve had internships and are considering another one this summer, but how much does luck truly impact your career outcomes?
– Is hard work and effort in Computer Science not always directly proportional to career success?
– Are you considering switching to medicine due to uncertainties in the tech field and the guaranteed success associated with a good work ethic in medicine?
### Concerns and Questions
– Are you worried about constantly scrambling for less than you deserve due to market conditions and other factors in the tech industry?
– Do you feel that your work ethic and dedication may not always translate to the success you desire in Computer Science?
– Have you ever questioned whether you truly enjoy your job in the tech field?
As you navigate your career choices, consider the role of luck in Computer Science success and how it may impact your future endeavors. #careerchoices #techindustry #successbalancingact
Luck is a big part of life.
Hard work helps put you in the best position no matter what your luck.
That’s true no matter what you decode.
Pick the path you think you would enjoy doing the most.
Luck matters in every field.
Did you try applying for new grad roles? How was the process if so?
if you tell me there’s no luck involved I’d say that’s bullshit
the interviewer you get, the questions you receive, whether the interviewer is in a good mood that day, whether they have a need for someone with your ability/background **right now** (as in, this job is open right now but did not exist 3 months ago and may not exist either 3 months from now, so it just happened that the time you’re job searching coincides with their hiring needs)
that being said though, one of my favorite quote: the harder I work, the luckier I get
over the past ~3 months I got rejected by like 7x onsites in a row that’s ~42 interviews wasted, if I crumbled or became depressed I would have probably never gotten the next 3x onsite which was 3 offers
Luck matters in every career but in tech somewhat more than in most.
1. Tech is a cyclical sector, so timing of entrance into the market matters.
2. Startups and high-growth companies are more common, and if you join a wild success you may get disproportionate lottery-like compensation and/or career growth. (e.g. be Amazon’s 12th employee)
3. Compensation varies a lot between employers so you can get paid a lot more or a lot less for doing similar work, depending on the company. Thus individual luck-related factors for which companies offer you a job (especially early on) can have a significant impact.
Then as with most careers where many are working for corporations, career growth and success are going to be strongly influenced by the success of the team, the influence of the manager, and relationship you have with your manager (a lot of that part may be out of your control), and so on. You can easily do good-quality work under a bad manager for a doomed project and have little to show for it, or do the same work under a successful team that will grow your skills / recognition / experiences / career. If you’re in a bad position you can always job hop, but that’s harder in some markets and is not as ideal as landing in a better situation in the first place.
Dude, if you’re anxious about just getting an entry level job in SWE, med school/residency is going to eat you alive.
The fact that you’re even talking about a masters and medicine suggests you’re quite lucky already to be born into a privileged life. If you do have good work ethic to put time and effort, then pour that into your internships to set yourself apart from your peers. There’s always demand for good, experienced SWEs.
Depends on experience. For me, I think a lot.
I tailor each of my job applications (so resume and cover letters were tailored to each job app). Applied to about 200 jobs, 4-5 interviews in total and my successful interview was basically a super friendly chat with my boss, a super friendly 2nd interview and got the position. Having 3 internships and work on personal projects allowed me to have a decent conversation with my future employers, so that helped
Since you mentioned medicine, if you are in the position to do medicine, I would go down that route first. Not scientifically proven or anything, but I feel that it would be easier to transition from medicine to CS, if you wanted to, later on in life (than vice versa)
It in no way discounts hard work, but luck does play a huge role
Yea, Luck plays a role big time. Hard work yes, but not gonna say luck doesn’t matter any day!
Luck factors in a lot. I got lucky getting interviews for internships. A few jobs I found that I landed were expiring the same day I found them, my life would probably be a little different if I didn’t open LinkedIn on certain days.
I have a relative who didn’t get selected for residency program and had to wait another year to try his chances again. Luck matters everywhere 🙂
>I know I have a good work ethic and can put in the time and effort, and in medicine this guarantees success.
I’m not trying to sway you away from medicine, but I’m curious: what are you basing this guarantee on?
Luck does matter but it’s not completely random like the lottery. You can do things to improve your odds. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success but hard work makes that final bit of lucky more likely.
Luck is a big factor. I tell young people all the time, it’s ok if you don’t land that 250k FAANG job straight out of college. Take a job for its potential. You may get an SDE adjacent job and you’d have the inside scoop on applying for the SDE job internally when they do come in.
That’s how I made moves in my career. I happened to be at the right place and right time when I got my first job in IT, when I originally thought it would just be a temp job at first. And that’s how I moved into my SDE career also.
People on social media advertising how easy it was for them to get a 300k job after coding boot camps is what is making your expectations way too unrealistic.
Luck and have connections with the right people 👍
The better you are, the less you need luck to get somewhere.
If you don’t put in the work, then you aren’t gonna do shit with any opportunity you’re given, but hard work doesn’t guarantee opportunities
Hard work gives you the ability to be lucky
Some chances can’t be taken unless you’ve put in the effort for it to present itself
If you are actually good at software engineering the sky is the limit. To be good at that… Is a matter of debate, but the power an individual has to contribute to a business if they are good at swe is undeniable.
Unfortunately Lots of people can never be good at swe…. likely most people… Being merely competent in software means you get pushed aside. You will have a career, but it will be likely be tedious.
So the risk you take is in discovering if you have the chops. Usually two or three years in you will either level up or wash out.
As with almost everything luck is a huge factor that gets slowly diminished by hard work over a long period of time.
It’s a numbers game. Every time you apply for a job, you have some chance of getting that job. Having a better resume and being a more qualified candidate increases your chances per job application. Applying to the right jobs increases your chances per job application. I’ve had interviews where writing a for loop was sufficient and interviews where I had to face multiple rounds of leetcode, panel style interviews, takehomes that took hours, etc and I’ve gotten offers from both. If you play the numbers game enough, you’ll win eventually, assuming basic competency.
And yes, I do like my job. It’s stressful at times and has definitely not been the healthiest thing for me to do with my time, but it’s rewarding and I’m pretty good at it!
I got very lucky in several areas.
1. I got an internship because a government contractor needed bodies thanks to a corrupt congressman
2. I got my full time job because of a favor from a professor
3. I got my first big-boy job making decent money because my manager was a director looking to throw bodies at a project in order to build an empire
4. I got called to “rescue” a project by a friend at a startup which got me a significant compensation boost
5. I got to be a manager because someone quit and they needed someone to fill in.
However, I kept those jobs and steady employment because I had skill. But I’ve had an insane amount of luck in actually finding and switching jobs.
I’m going with a lot.
I’ve had two job offers in this past month fall through.
First one because they failed to win a contract. No fault of my own.
Second one because the manager decided that they didn’t actually need another person and they can just dump the work on the remaining SWE. It’s an internal position. Then they also said if it’s too much they’ll just bring in an intern from another site.
The fact of the matter is that right now things are bad and getting worse. Companies budgets are extremely tight, which means little to no hiring.
On the other hand, I just received an email from work stating that this was the best quarter ever and they had a 17% increase in revenue and a $XXXM net income increase. Start sharpening the pitchforks.
Of course there’s luck involved, but when a good opportunity shows up you have to be prepared. Your largest obstacle will be getting your foot in the door, that’s where luck will help you the most.
I love my job, your manager will be 90% responsible for how much you enjoy the work honestly.
Luck matters in all careers. But you need to be ready when luck comes. It’s not the extreme where people think something just falls into their lap. The people who take advantage of opportunities when they come have likely been preparing in some fashion. Don’t listen to people who say it’s all luck.
There’s some factor of luck that determines if you are laid off or not. I was pre-med in college, but that was ages ago. I’m not sure what the med school admissions process looks like any more, but there were many qualified candidates who were rejected and then had no backup plan. I’m not sure how much you want to argue that luck factors in to med school admissions, too. There are people who argue in the US the AMA wants to keep the number of physicians artificially low, so that compensation can stay high.
I feel like, in general, hard work is rewarded in this field. There are exceptions, of course, and you won’t get everything you want, but chances are if you are able to find a job, you’ll generally trend well. Entry level is very challenging right now, though, because of the general market and a few other factors.
A few random personal examples:
* During 2020, before the economy bounced back, I was at a digital agency. They were starting to furlough people. I was on a few potential projects, but they didn’t pan out. I was unstaffed, so I assumed I’d get either furloughed or laid off. A lot of other people had a similar thought. One person took an offer elsewhere, and that opened up a spot on a project for me. I always considered myself lucky in that scenario.
* While looking for new job a few years later, I had been in discussions with a recruiter for a contracting firm. They fired a tech lead on one of their projects. They used internal recruiters rather than advertise the position, and they were trying to find someone quickly. I lucked out because I had the existing relationship with the recruiter, and the fact the previous tech lead had been fired (hence the position opening up).
But things like that likely happen in all sorts of fields.
I know people who worked at tiny companies that got acquired and then ended up making a lot of money. And I know some really smart people who got laid off. There’s good and bad luck everywhere, but it’s not the only thing at play.
There’s also a question of where people are spending all their time and effort.
I’d say equal parts luck, equal parts determination, equal parts preparation.
You can grind for months, prep perfectly, and you happen to get the wrong interviewer on the wrong day asking the wrong question.
You can wander into an interview you weren’t prepared for, get an interviewer you gel with, get asked a question you’ve happened to see before, and get sent through.
You can get unlucky on all your interviews, 6 months later again, get unlucky, 6 months later again, finally do it.
Once you have the job, you can get lucky and get assigned a project that turns into a high vis project. You can get lucky in that the peers on your team are easy to stand out among. You can overcome all that with hard work and determination. Or you can be unlucky and get put on a low impact team no one cares about. You can get put on a team that has low priority headcount, etc.
I’ve known geniuses who were unlucky to get stuck on a low impact team and not determined enough to move to a better team. And I’ve known goof balls who end up on the same shitty team but are determined to make it to a better team and it works out.
Yea, I like my job.
Luck can definitely matter, but chance always favors the prepared mind. Good engineers are always valuable, even if they weren’t attached to some hyperscaled project that catapults their career.
Luck really comes into it when you gain reputation through some famous project, like starting a DB at FAANG that hits it big, or being minted a millionaire on start up stock. Those were great engineers anyway, it’s just you sometimes get disproportionately credited for the work you do.
Either way, to just get a job, I don’t think luck is much of a factor, since interviews are standardized and you get several attempts. The people not getting jobs aren’t unlucky in their interview attempts, they are unlucky the bar is so high.
Thus, if you’re at GT, and could seriously consider med school, you most likely will be able to work as a SWE. Just consider the bar is higher than ever before, and work on interview specific skills.
>Is the amount of effort and hardwork I put in not likely gonna be proportionate to my career outcomes?
I don’t know about medicine, but “effort and hard work” includes not only technical accomplishments but also social and interpersonal accomplishments.
I’m sure you’ve heard of those exceptionally talented devs who can single-handedly build amazon from scratch, but have the social skills of a rock and you absolutely don’t want them talking to clients.
And yes, luck matters a lot. Right time, right place. Advances in technology. Catastrophic disasters.
But if you built a strong network, you might find yourself in the way of opportunities more often because people happen to call you up more often. Lot of people out there that seem to be always finding success, aren’t necessarily relying completely on luck.
right place, right time. Matters every single day
Luck is a significant factor. That’s also true in medicine, btw.
I wish a 1 year masters was an option when I was in school.
Luck plays a role, but successful people “make their own luck” by relentlessly preparing, refusing to give up, repeating after failure/rejection.
Often what you see externally is quite different than the journey to get there. For example someone could be a senior+ FANG SWE. You could take it for granted and assume they always worked there or got in easy. But maybe their story is more challenging; where they tried for multiple years to get in and failed, or prepared for thousands of hours of leetcode and interview prep etc. to eventually make their own luck and get in.
Also, luck is the product of hard work
If you’re not fully invested in the field, why immediately continue with a masters? Since you are graduating soon, I would just start trying to get a job in the field and see whether you can find a job and whether you like it and then proceed from there.
If I were starting from scratch and becoming a doctor was an option and I had no personal preference, I would definite choose doctor. Tech is a crapshoot of ever changing requirements and non-sensical interview challenges and I am saying this as someone who has been fully employed the entire time.
A lot of luck to get the job, a lot of luck not to be on a toxic micro-managed team, and even more luck if you’re in a big name that you won’t be randomly laid off because they lay off the whole team.
As a … Chex notes… “Senior” … Do you even like the material?
Luck is everything
I love my job and I work in a super boring non-tech industry. I’ll leave as soon as I get something that pays better though….
I was studying c++ at uni, started making games in unity for fun, got hired for a small company in my town that wanted to do some gamefication for their projects, gamefication was left behind, I knew C# from unity so they got me fixing bugs, it was a startup so people come and go but I stayed, big tech company buys startup, I was the oldest dev in the team so I got hired, now I’m a tech lead at big company
I think luck played a big part for me haha
Hey life is luck oriented.
Don’t go in to medicine for the money and prestige. It’s a genuine vocation and we don’t need any more shitty doctors.
Luck matters in all aspects of life, but you can’t control it so don’t focus on it. Focus on aspects you can control like technical abilities, social skills and health
Huge,
Mediocre lazy dev here making 400k after 3 YOE. I just got lucky with Amazon job out of school.
Of course. Consider that starting your career before or after the interest rate hikes likely determines whether you’re at faang right now or unemployed.
It’s always a factor (with everything in life).
During the pandemic, I seriously considered taking a gap year in college, ended up choosing not to.
If I had graduated a year later I would have ended up in a terrible job market, but when I graduated the market was still hot and I got a faang job (as a return offer from an internship).
Yup, very luck based. Good luck w/ med school