7d ago

Don't know what to do as a new CS grad? It's easy bro, just work for Google or launch a startup

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It’s honestly not too bad for advice, although it’s definitely exaggerated (i.e. 300k for a fresh grad; risk for a startup is high, not medium-low). The problem is not the path, it’s getting your foot in the door. CS grads are having a hard time getting hired in the first place. How can you do those things if you can’t even get started.
- It's deranged advice.
  About 1% of cs grads are able to innovate something and start a company. And 97% of them will fail in a year.
  I lived through the 1st big tech "startup" thing, I was involved in many myself, it's no little game you play
  It's how you end up $140,000 in debt, and unable to make your lease payments because your major customer just fucked you over, because their main customer just went into bankruptcy, because Paramount put a moratorium on Star Trek franchise licensing to prevent brand dilution.
  You don't fuck around and just decide you're going to start a tech business and everything is gold... Like at least get a couple years working in a few failed startups to see exactly what the pitfalls are
  Can't get work after graduation? Perhaps you squandered your time and came out of school with nothing to show and you're not able to stand above your contemporaries. Sucks and maybe you should have tried harder.
  Tech is a vicious game. Nobody kid themselves please I'm begging you
  Edit. If you're not walking out with your degeee in one hand and a fully fledged, innovative, killer product in the other, you're already finished. Even then you can have investors lined up like salivating dogs, and still fail in a spectacular explosion
  
  You're not finished until you're in the ground. Anything could happen. But god damn does it just get harder every year.
  
  You’re not wrong, and the post does say that - starting your own company or creating something new isn’t something that everyone can do, and it’s a tiny, tiny percentage who are actually successful. That’s why the first option they listed is to just join big tech and be a regular cog in the wheel. Obviously as I said, 300k is definitely NOT something you get as a fresh grad. But option 1 is the path of 99.99% of people, becoming an employee. And as I mentioned, that’s hard to do if you can’t even get your foot in the door in the first place.
  
  But really read what the guys saying. 2 and 3 are basically the same thing.
  Oh yeah no job? Just go become a start-up founding engineer. Problem, bud?
  It's delusional idiocy. All of it.
  Edit to extrapolate on my underlying, unspoken point
  I think there's an elephant in the room that's very difficult for people to accept: the era of semi-qualified people getting jobs straight out of school went bye-bye and it's never coming back.
  If you're not the top five or 10 being scouted actively in your graduating class, you're basically doomed. Further to that, if you haven't been scouted, you're not the kind of person who has the skill to do any of the other suggestions the man puts forward.
  I don't want to speak in such dark terms but I've lived this life. It's game over for people who aren't eating, breathing, and shitting tech every minute of their life.

15 comments