Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I fell for the lie that college name doesn't matter and that your college major matters more. Total lie. The students in my high school class who made it to big named, elite colleges (Northwestern, UChicago, Havard, etc) all majored in random, easy liberal arts subjects (art history, music, and sociology). All are now working as software developers making 80-150k/year at different companies. This is starting salary by the way.
I went to an mediocre but cheap local state college (UGA) and majored in computer science. I found a job as a software developer making only 70k/year. My friends who majored in easy liberal arts subjects at UGA? Working minimum wage jobs.
in short, go to the ivy.
If you think UGA is a mediocre school then you must think my alumna (Georgia State) is a diploma mill and the students that go there might as well drop out and deliver pizzas or get their CDL and become a truck driver because all Georgia State University graduates are going to be getting minimum wage jobs when they graduate.
My degree at Georgia State only got me a chemist position only making $50k a year in West Virginia. I guess I should of went to Emroy. Then I would be making 6 figures right now.
Last edited by Poor Chemist; 06-01-2016 at 04:07 PM..
Sounds like you've worked at companies that don't value you, not true tech companies.
This is true, they were a financial services company, a music distribution corporation, and an engineering firm. But then IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. weren't about to hire someone like me.
Also are they living in ATL or NYC/Silicon Valley etc?
Maybe they have better interviewing and/or people skills.
Sounds like you have a job in your major - be happy.
I agree. The OP probably lives in the Atlanta area making $70k but his buddy that went to MIT is making $150k lives in New York City which has a cost of living 3X the amount of Atlanta's COL. The average apartment in NYC costs $3500-4000 a month while in Atlanta $900-1200 a month. Much of the bigger salary of his friends is probably being ate up in higher housing costs.
I fell for the lie that college name doesn't matter and that your college major matters more. Total lie. The students in my high school class who made it to big named, elite colleges (Northwestern, UChicago, Havard, etc) all majored in random, easy liberal arts subjects (art history, music, and sociology). All are now working as software developers making 80-150k/year at different companies. This is starting salary by the way.
I went to an mediocre but cheap local state college (UGA) and majored in computer science. I found a job as a software developer making only 70k/year. My friends who majored in easy liberal arts subjects at UGA? Working minimum wage jobs.
It's about what you can do in software dev, and whether you can pass an algorithms interview. Honestly you don't need that deep of a CS education to get a basic job. Programming101+data structures is good enough to get in. Plus doing some personal projects on the side. You don't need to be an expert on OS or AI or anything crazy like that unless you want to work at Google or similar. It may be easier to get an interview coming from Harvard, but those kids can still get laughed out the door.
You don't really learn software development by being a CS major. The best CS courses for that are taken in your first year. After that, you take tons of classes like theoretical CS, algorithms, operating systems, networks, AI, etc. These classes (other than the first two I mentioned) typically have programming components, but they're very small, and often very low level C stuff. Not like all the Javascript and its 50 billion frameworks where the jobs are. CS students get out of practice with real coding (and first year classes tend to only have fairly basic projects anyway), just like math students get out of practice with calculus. You do learn a couple languages well enough to pick up whatever you need for a job efficiently. But the only way to really learn a language is to build stuff with it, so learning a language just to learn a language without any project in mind can be a fairly useless endeavor.
The students who really are prepared get internships, make side projects that are interesting to them, and make open source contributions. Plus hackathons, at least if you're into the startup type atmosphere.
Heck, most CS programs teach nothing about version control and very little about command line hackery.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
