Is it a Mistake to Have Chosen University Over Work in Programming? #CareerAdvice #Programming #UniversityVersusWork
Hey there! Seeking some guidance on my current dilemma. I’ve been coding since I was in elementary school, mainly in Java, C++, and Bash on my Linux OS. I started freelancing in middle school, building skills in coding, databases, and Git. But now, as a college student in my fourth semester at a top technical university, I find most of the material too easy and boring, except for the challenging math subjects. Two years ago, there were plenty of job offers for junior programmers, but now the market is oversaturated. Should I have skipped university and gone straight to work?
What Should I Specialize in: Cybersecurity or AI and Data Science? #JobMarketAnalysis #SpecializationAdvice
I’m torn between specializing in cybersecurity or diving into AI and data-related fields. Which one do you think has better job prospects in the current market? I need to make a decision soon.
How Can I Write an Effective CV Without Legal Work Experience? #CVWriting #LegalWorkExperience
I’ve never had a legal job or paid taxes for my freelance work, making it hard to showcase my experience on my CV. How can I write a CV that appeals to potential employers despite this lack of formal experience?
I appreciate any insights or advice you can offer! Thank you for your help! (Apologies for any language errors, English isn’t my native language) #SeekingAdvice #ProgrammingCareerInsights
It stupid, but the degree does matter. People saying it doesn’t already got there’s and don’t understand how unhirable you are without one.
So maybe, but probably not.
Why can you not put it in the CV. Are they going to report you? How would they know you didn’t pay taxes?
no, you need the degree. market is so saturated most companies are filtering by degree now, which they weren’t doing a few years ago. they’re even filtering out non-credentialed candidates with significant experience. literally nothing is more important at the moment than a degree.
What bad/poor English?! We understood your post and responded. You’re on this forum inquiring about learning and mastering something new. Heck, it seems like uni was a good choice. In hindsight, you might’ve chosen a different path. However, the knowledge and the well-honed, effective learning habits and skills you acquired were not wasted.
And that also goes for the rest of you. Knowledge and skills are valuable, and the effort you were willing to spend to get them is commendable. Driving on a straight road to a destination without detours makes for an excruciating, boring road trip!
Thanks for all the advice and the words of encouragement guys. Honestly speaking I kinda panicked because I see 100 articles/posts a day about how it’s impossible to get a job as a junior developer and how chat GPT is going to replace all software engineers in 5 years. For a long time I have loved coding/IT and getting a job I’m the field would be a dream come true, even if I got payed the minimum wage. It would be also nice to work remotely because my current commute to and from uni takes over 4 hours. For now the plan is to learn as much as I can, apply for a scholarship, go for an internship or two (I’ve already got one offer for 3 months in a big company), make a couple of polished projects for my cv, finish my degree and hopefully with that I can land a job in the field. If I have any further problems or questions I’ll surely ask again!
You’ll need a 4-year degree to be competitive nowadays. Look at all the misery on all the coding forums. Take out the degree, it’ll also help with immigration.
OP pay taxes. You might think you don’t need to, but it’s better to in the long run. It’s not far fetched at some point for some third party to indicate that you have been paid and they go back over x many years, total then add interest. It really isn’t worth it, especially since you can claim it as work and experience for any job in the future.
In addition, yes maybe at the time it was a bad decision. Experience matters more than a degree so sometimes having that can give you an edge. Some on here have mentioned though the screen degrees, though I’ve never seen it where I worked. The market is a lot more difficult now and it’s pretty wild I think everyone expecting a role with a big pay day and cross training to software development. Having other options is better.
Some companies may not even filter until the end. Some discussion with Amazon. They said their preference is degrees, so you may go all through the stages and it’s between you and another person, but they have a degree. I’m guessing performance might still swing it but it’s not a great stage to find out. Last I heard was about 5 interviews, but I’ve not been in the loop for a while.
Anyway, it is safer to have a degree but I still think experience is the stronger element. Finish your degree.
It’s not supposed to be easy. After you graduate the hard part begins.
Sure you have work experience but then someone with a degree, work experience and maturity will always have the upper edge.
You need to study on your own to not get bored. Get graduate books from the university (electronic) library on subjects like graph theory, advanced algorithms, linear algebra, geometry or do programming challenges online on leetcode and other websites. Create a time plan, work through the problems in the books, do a programming excercise related to what you read.
Publish real world programming projects on your github.
Read papers and implements them. Actively learn and revise.
You should absolutely create a time table first for better overview.
The degree helps a lot with finding a job. But because of the timing, maybe. 2 years ago it was a LOT easier to find a good job. It might have been easier for you to find a job then without a degree than it is now with one.
If you went right to work, most likely you would’ve become a code monkey earning slightly above minimum wage.
If uni is that easy for you, use your time to fokus on your degrees and do internships at reputable companies. Maybe even going abroad for a semester or two. Apply for competitions and scholarships. Fill your CV with that.
You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you have nothing to show for it won’t matter.
It will help you get to get your cv trough the filter, then youll coding skills will make you pass the interviews. You should work as a freelancer or half time on small projects to sharpen your skills and get some more things to show as work related
I’m in the Uk and have been a professional developer for 24 years and have been coding for a lot longer. Completely self taught. I have no degree or any other qualification related to software development, but have never had a problem getting a job. That said I do have a number of public projects, including one that’s currently being sold (I guess it helps that it has 17 reviews with a 5 out of 5 star rating!)
I think a lot of people have covered this already but I wanted to add my thoughts.
First off, never worry yourself with whether you screwed up a life decision or not. You can’t go back and change it. So the next question is, what do you want to do from this point right now?
I totally coasted through my non-CS degree – I got a reputation for how little work I did and I genuinely shocked a lot of the people who knew me at uni when I graduated (with third class honours). Truth was I didn’t enjoy my degree subject at all. It failed to engage me and I with it (with the exception of maybe a couple of modules).
But with 20 years of hindsight now I can safely say that attending university changed me in other ways. I’ve made friends for life. I’ve learned arguably more important lessons on things like budgeting, living by my self and emotional maturity that I really wouldn’t have learned without the experience of leaving home.
I’ve also interviewed and worked with many people over the time since I graduated. It’s not perfectly clear cut but I see the above in those people as well. I think it’s one of the reasons companies will ask for a degree.
Lastly, please don’t worry about your experience being “illegal” for tax reasons. No prospective employer is going to do the work of the tax collector. They want to know your experience to be able to see if you’d be a good fit for their project(s). So if you have examples of your work that you can tell them about or share, do it.
In regards to your freelance stuff, of course you can put it on your CV. Paying taxes on it is irrelevant, it’s still experience that you have that can give you an advantage when showing your competency.
Nobody is going to sit there and double check, it’s not that deep. Hell I’ve been at the same role for a while, but as time has gone on I’ve split it up into individual positions within the company on my CV. It’s all about marketing yourself as the best fit you can be for roles.
Nah, you didn’t.
That piece of paper may seem like a waste of 4 years, but welcome to humanity. You need that paper, irregardless, of if the process of getting it challenges you or not. I’d recommend just sticking it out, and if you really want to be challenged and not enter the workforce when you’re done with it, get a masters which should challenge you a bit more.
Get the easy degree, if you can keep freelancing on the side. When you’ll get in the market you’ll have both a degree and a shitton of experience. You see often meme posts with companies looking to hire juniors with 10 years of experience? This is obviously not realistic. But this will be you.
I don’t worry at all for you.
Nope, you should enjoy Uni life especially given it’s free. Enjoy this phase with no responsibility. Socialise and build a friend network or join a club, eg sports or comp society.
Given you think you know most of it, then there’s no excuse to not ace all your assessments and exams. Now with the spare bandwidth do something with your skills or knowledge. Time well spent is never wasted. Also don’t let the current environment dictate what you can do, think outside the box and do things differently.
I’m in the US but some companies will auto filter your resume out without a degree. It’s stupid, but it’s how it is right now. The tech space is very competitive… speaking for the majority, we all felt like comp sci was easy in school. One of the hardest parts for highly technical people is getting a good grasp on the HOW and WHY our end users have problems and use applications. I would seriously recommend you spend a small amount of time understanding the SDLC (which can even apply in cyber security) just so you have a grasp on how companies navigate the complexities of development.
Tldr; finish school
No. That piece of paper you get at the end will help a lot with actually getting a job.
Depends, if Europe is anything like the U.S., a large number of fortune 500 companies have stopped hiring self-taught without a degree because of the oversaturated tech market. Unless you have some pretty impressive projects in your portfolio and a couple of internships, you might risk not being hirable.
I’m not certain if you screwed up, because I don’t know your exact skill level or the job market in your area, but a degree in CS will definitely net you even more pay than if you didn’t have one, I’ve known many people who had been programming for years and in the tech industry for years as well, go back to school simply because their company wants to promote them and give them a raise but they can’t unless they had a CS degree. In most cases, a company will even offer to pay for you to get your degree and go back to school if they see you as a valuable asset. Again though, this was like 10 years ago, things are different nowadays.
From my perspective, you didn’t
You can focus on having a great GPA, try to get into good internships by the end of UNI
What is killing you is the “what if”
Let me ask this instead: “What if you got layoff as a Junior without a degree?”
Just do the absolutely best you can do
Nobody knows the future, but it’s a safe bet that AI will be in demand… AI and math walk closely together
I had a similar profile to you. Started coding pretty young and decided to start working at 17 rather than go to university. I had a huge advantage there on the basis that the timeframe of me turning 17 was around the start of the upswing of the first big dot com bubble. There was no problem with people hiring.
If you’d have asked me this question before you started university, I would have probably recommended that you look for a job. However, we are, now, where we are…
What I would say is this… having now spent rather a lot of time as somebody who does interviews and hiring, the vast majority of new grads are, at best, borderline hireable. Unfortunately, most universities are doing a terrible job at preparing people for work in the private sector.
If you are better than most, and can prove it, you’ll likely have less of a problem than the current influx of, “I’ve been to 200 interviews and still haven’t gotten a job”, style posts might indicate.
As an interviewer of entry level engineers, I can tell you that it feels a bit like Groundhog Day. If you can legitimately show some deeper insight based on all this extra experience you have, you’ll stand out in a rather significant way. Hell, if you can write some clean, readable code with decent test coverage and put it on a GitHub profile… you are already in the top 2%. You just need somebody who is prepared to notice that. They are out there.
You didn’t screw up, and you absolutely can put down your freelance experience on your CV even if you didn’t pay taxes (nobody’s looking that hard at them). It sounds like you’re in your first year of Uni so things will seem pretty straightforward if you already have experience, but things will almost definitely ramp up in difficulty pretty soon.
I personally think you’re just overthinking things a little bit. Stick with your education, study hard, program for fun (if you enjoy it), make friends in your course/university. It’ll be fine, you haven’t screwed up.
Does your school have the option for you to test out of certain classes so you can focus your time on harder classes/things you want to learn next within the field?
Are you in Turkey?