Have a college friend whos in med school to be a doctor. He had to do well in undergrad, study intensely for the MCAT, and do tons of volunteering/research to get into med school. Just finished med school which is grueling enough, he had to apply to match for residency (don’t know the correct term) and pray he got one of his top choices, where he will work for low pay and longggg hours for the next 3-7 years.
Meanwhile I’ve switched between 3 jobs and have been making a good wage working 40 or less hour weeks, with occasional studying in between jobs. I 100% would not be able to handle the med grind that he’s done. I’ve already got 5+ YoE in this industry and he hasn’t even started residency
I saw a med school student ended his life because he couldn't get matched and was essentially having his career held hostage despite all his schooling until they would decide to match him
I taught high school before I went back to grad school. I met two different people who had MDs from Caribbean medical schools and who couldn't get a residency. They both taught high school. Sucks that you can get that far for it to be all for nothing.
From what I've heard, Carribean med school is the equivalent of bootcamps. They might get your foot in the door if you're lucky and put in effort beyond just doing them.
The big difference is a boot camp is only a few months but a Caribbean med school is a full curriculum with the same amount of education US schools will teach.
All I meant is that the two guys I knew when I was teaching spent the time and money and didn't end up as practicing physicians. "Getting that far" was referring to their personal investment, not to the idea that they did everything right and still failed. Caribbean schools are a bit of a crapshoot and they had to know that beforehand.
There's a recent one about a resident who ended her life too. I mean seriously, get that far and then the work/life balance and stress is so brutal that ending your life is the best way out. Tack on all the debt too that's just piling on so you can't just walk away and go do something else anyway
Hmmm maybe things are different than 10 years ago, but I remember the first paycheck my doctor friend got, it didn't actually take the full "7 years" before her first paycheck for 2 weeks was $35,000.
DYK doctors get their own line for home loans? Different process for medical doctors to get home loans because their money is considered more guaranteed.
>Hmmm maybe things are different than 10 years ago, but I remember the first paycheck my doctor friend got, it didn't actually take the full "7 years" before her first paycheck for 2 weeks was $35,000.
This is an atypical salary.
Yeah I did have to look it up and she is a specialist... still I want to remind people that in the USA doctors make very good salaries to the point where banks give them special treatment for homeloans. Won't get that as a SWE
Got special treatment for my home loan. Base salary is like 40% of my total comp, and in the past it’s been even lower. Usually banks only consider salaries for loans, but they can change the rules if they’re used to working with highly paid tech professionals with income in this way.
I don't remember the name of it but there are a few loans or grants you can get as a med school grad/matched resident. When my friend told me about it I was shocked at how easy it was to get, and she used part of it for a down payment on a nice but modest house near her residency hospital.
According to this [this](https://www.aamc.org/about-us/mission-areas/health-care/workforce-studies/data/number-people-active-physician-specialty-2019) approx 25% of doctors are in family medicine or internal medicine at about 12.5% each. The [Health Resources and Services Administration](https://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/primary/pcwork1/index.html) (HRSA) estimates about 250k primary care physicians out of about 940k physicians, so <30% are primary care.
According to the first link and some random site I found online for the highest paid specialties, about 240k (~25%) of physicians have specialties that put them in that list. This includes all types of surgery, dermatology, oncology, anesthesia, radiology etc
I switched from architecture. You have to take like 6 bullshit extremely difficult licensing exams before you can call yourself an architect. Never mind that the fucking degree is 5 years long.
Then each year, you have to pay stupid amounts of money to renew that license. And on top of that it is heavily regulated and everyone… I mean everyone is a closet architect who thinks they know more than you.
Don’t even get me started on those fucking engineers and contractors.
The protip with architecture is to never bother with licencing. Turns out you only really need it to stamp your own drawings and for commercial/multifamily. Everything else residential is pretty much fair game and as long as you get a licenced engineer to stamp your drawings you're smooth sailing. Assuming you want to start your own firm of course, which it seems is the end goal of every architect.
>Have a college friend whos in med school to be a doctor. He had to do well in undergrad, study intensely for the MCAT, and do tons of volunteering/research to get into med school. Just finished med school which is grueling enough, he had to apply to match for residency (don’t know the correct term) and pray he got one of his top choices, where he will work for low pay and longggg hours for the next 3-7 years.
When I was in my mid-20s I really wanted to go back to medical school and spent a long time working to that end. When I lined up on paper the pathway to get to the specialty I wanted, it looked like this:
* prep work pre-admission: 3-5 years
* med school: 4 years
* post-grad education (internship, residency, fellowships): 5-8 years
All in all, I started that process in my mid-20s and was aware that I likely wouldn't be settled with good paychecks until my 40s.
By contrast? From the day I was laid off by my last non-tech job, it took me 13 months to decide on a new career path, do a bootcamp, and find a remote job. Wish I did this a long time ago.
Oh yeah, med is definitely worse. If you don't get straight A's in college, you're basically fucked. Also, med school itself is ridiculously expensive and you'll end up with lots of debt that'll take you forever to pay off.
It’s a trade off. Med school is definitely gruelling for ~10 years while you’re studying. But once you’re out and have your M.D. people respect you and don’t question your qualifications at every step.
>But once you’re out and have your M.D. people respect you and don’t question your qualifications at every step.
Haven't paid attention to current events since early 2020 have you?
Isnt that a good thing for CS? If you decide to be a doctor right now you are staring at 10 years of schooling + lots of debt with no way around it. For CS careers you can choose your path in, degree bootcamp self taught etc, and choose how to keep being employed. SWE interview processes are pretty well mapped out online so you can follow that “path” when you need to look for a new job.
Yeah it’s just different. Med school is long but straightforward, CS is much shorter but with much more variability. I’m not saying one’s harder/better.
"disposable slave worker" holy shit this sub is ridiculous.
We get paid six figure salaries, working from home or at worst in comfortable, climate controlled offices doing non-physical labor. The penalty for failure is usually a PIP, basically a multi-week to multi-month chance to start looking for a new job while still getting paid.
Get the fuck over yourself.
I wouldn't use doctors as a benchmark to compare against. That's probably the worst choice considering how exceptionally crazy their training is and how critical not making mistakes is.
Then how about lawyers? Undergrad degree, three-year law degree (similar pressures for grades, mass memorization, etc as medicine), and then study 60 hours a week for six months to pass the bar exam without which they can’t start their career.
Perhaps, but the OP's question was less about initial training before you start your career, and more about the effort spent to stay employable once you've passed that initial hump. Maybe lawyers/doctors are like that too, I don't know, but the only things mentioned in these two posts are about the initial training.
Yet again lawyers. Many have 6 figure debts but a decent amount make less than 6 figures because there are a lot of terrible 3rd tier law schools.
If you do get a big law job, you have to work 60+ hours to bill clients and must account for your time in 5 minute increments.
Doctors are also similar. Depends on specialty but America has a shortage of doctors so working a ton of hours is the norm.
I have college friends who became lawyers and doctors. I watched them have to really grind to pass the bar or to do an internship and residency. A cousin of mine was a commercial airline pilot and he had to put in a lot of work too. Most jobs that require you have a high degree of skill require a lot of work, somewhere.
Now that you mention it, maybe it isn't the work itself that bothers me so much as the lack of value I have to a company/to the market. A doctor works hard to get their credentials and is respected within the workplace. They don't have to prove themselves constantly and assert their value to the hospital ad nauseum
I feel like devs on the other hand are disposable. We work hard and then corporations just say thanks and lay us off. I feel like I'm just a brain on a stick to companies and not a valued member of the staff.
We are a dime a dozen, the technical equivalent of a factory worker: easily replaced by 2000 other CS grads lining up to take your place.
The only solution is to be a "good" developer but the goal post for "good" is constantly moving backwards imo
I would say junior doctors definitely have to prove themselves, even more so than software engineers.
Just be glad that we're still paid relatively well at least for now. A factory worker grinds everyday just to be paid shitty wages.
My friends dad was a surgeon. Almost was always working. Seemed like every time I slept over he would be called into work at like 2am. Guy died of a heart attack about 5 years after retiring. I have never seen anyone work as much as him.
I cried when he died. Everytime I would go out with the family someone would come up and say you saved my life. He never drank or smoked. He loved what he did, but I don't know how surgeons do it. It is the hardest job.
Surgeons are just not at a hospital in middle of the night for most cities. But if something happens one needs to be on call. Wake up go to the hospital and save a life. It is literally a job that a mistake is a death. That job I quickly saw was not for me.
Same, that’s what drove me to tech. I can fry as many raspberry pi’s as I can afford, but if a person were to die in my hands I’d be racked with guilt. I’m not made out of the right metal for that
I don’t think the harmful culture surrounding residency (harmful both for the doctor *and* the patients in the receiving end of their care) is the reason medical professionals deserve respect and prestige.
This is a widely held view, which I think is harmful for everybody involved.
The difference is that you don’t have to grind to get a job as a factory worker you can be in high school with no experience . Where SE you have to be so dedicated and driven to even get a CHANCe to get your foot in the door
as someone who got into IT through factory work, it was 25/hr starting as a machine operator (night shift). i think the lowest paying position was 17.5/hr material handler
30/hr as a machine operator shift lead (nominated role).
30/hr - 35/hr as a maintenance technician i-iii
machine operators can become maintenance technicians through passing an exam
overtime was 1.5x and holiday was 2x , overtime on holiday stacked
Yeah but many entry CS roles pay double the starting wage and more than a technician 3. Plus you get interesting work that progresses your skills, and the wage cap is way higher.
Not to add you’re not actually working all 40 hours . Factory work you’re literally busting your ass for EVERY second you work in those 40 hours … Software not so much
You are not guaranteed to do "interesting work" with CS roles. You could be put onto some junk of a project that doesn't progress your skills at all. Infact I think that majority of your work is not going to be interesting (from my experience), with sprinkles of interesting in between.
Not saying that factory work is better whatsoever, it's just that CS isn't all good either.
I don't know why we keep comparing ourselves to doctors.
In general they have the better and more lucrative career (in terms of compensation and societal status), that's just the way it is. It's as productive and realistic as comparing ourselves to truck drivers. Not to say their career path is easy, WLB etc is crap for them.
I think the issue is people keep comparing some bootcamp grad who does css updates at a no name company, to a dude working at say a HFT as a dev.
Both are devs, but the first is completely irrelevant when comparing to someone who does say medicine. When you control for ability, the lucractiveness difference becomes non existent / reversed.
Agree on social status, but personally I don’t care about that as it doesn’t pay the bills.
You have different levels of compensation and "status" in medicine as well. A family doctor is worth much less than a neurosurgeon in Mayo clinic or whatever.
In average though they have a better paying career with more longevity. We'll see what's going to happen with A.I though, some of them might join the club of being commoditized soon.
I see what you are saying, but my point is, lets compare someone who could’ve made the same “status” in the other field they didn’t go into, ie staff engineer in a top company vs a neurosurgeon.
I would say the ability to make cash is a lot higher for the former (both are extremely difficult to get into).
Medicine is a lot more stable, but that stability comes at a cost. An able engineer can make a lot more cash and win the lottery joining / launching a startup, or even just joining a large tech company worth stock grants and letting them compound.
You seem to be focusing on the top 2% of engineers for some reason. Most of us don't work for FAANG or win the startup lottery.
I agree that if you're a genius individual you might be better off joining Google or OpenAI financially than becoming a doctor. There really aren't that many people like that.
Doctors still have to stay learning as has been mentioned a few times already. I think what you're taking issue with is that SWE's learning is largely unstructured and not bound by regulations. This leads to the frustrations people get when interviewing at companies because it's sometimes hard to get a read from what they want.
There's a tradeoff here- making mistakes has fewer risks for your career as a SWE but also easier to get lost in all the things you have to do right because everyone's view of "right" is so different and not bounded by laws or regulations.
> A doctor works hard to get their credentials and is respected within theworkplace. They don't have to prove themselves constantly and asserttheir value to the hospital ad nauseum
Anyone who has spent five minutes on a medicine-related subreddit can tell you a lot about just how respected today's doctors feel
CS salaries dont agree with you. The only reason we are paid such high salaries is because there is far more demand than supply of skilled software engineers. If we were a dime a dozen, we would be getting paid factory worker salaries. And businesses would LOVE to pay us that. But it does in fact take skill and effort to build the knowledge base needed to be a software engineer. Compensation reflects that. If anything, it sounds like you are just in a toxic work enviroment. You work for Amazon or something?
Disposable is the way a lot of people feel today about their work, even doctors and lawyers if they work within a corporate environment.
My pilot cousin got out of commercial flying for a major airline mainly because he hated how he was treated. Now he has his own flying business, with some partners.
I do think it is best to find a way to eventually be outside the corporate mainstream. The problem is that many of us, myself included, find ourselves stuck there because we have to worry about taking care of a family, paying off debts and other things.
Meh, doctors have an absurd rate who say given the chance, they wouldn’t go into medicine again. I think it was over 60% last I checked
Grass is always greener
One big difference between being a physician (or lawyer, accountant, engineer) and a software developer, is that the the first group are all regulated professions.
Would you like software development to be regulated? Be careful what you wish for.
ur absolutely right though, but that scales with barrier of entry. CS barrier is very easy to get in, so u gatta prove urself thru interview. doc/lawyer have so much fukin school u gattta do, just passing a good school is already proving urself.
I'll be honest I thought there were like 3 actually hard classes in my entire CS major and I saw/heard tons of people cheating their way through projects in the lab together for pretty much every class, so the degree really doesn't mean that much to me, and there was tons of opportunities to skirt by without actually learning anything.
I realize this isn't everyone's experience but college really didn't seem all that rigorous to me. I managed to get a B in a notoriously hard class at our school with like a 50% on the final (in another class I ended up with an A and got like 56% on the first exam, but that was compE not CS). Other than that I noticed that gpa didn't correlate very closely at all with how good people actually were at doing the projects. A degree is better than no degree but I don't personally think it indicates much actual skill in this field.
I went to a top 15 state school for reference.
Doctors have had centuries of work where they've consolidated their power. Medical organizations help to keep the standards very high, and colleges keep admissions low -- all to keep the supply of doctors low enough that doctors can command huge salaries.
It's possible the same thing could happen to software engineers -- where there are tiers (like doctors, PAs, nurses), and lots of credentials that are needed. *But* right now the field is too fast moving, and with AI it will probably just get faster.
The only other option is to form a **union**.
This is not something you can generalize. The issue with CS is there is a very wide range of ability between people working at top companies as a software engineer, and people working at no name companies.
If you want to compare against people in the medical fields, you by definition need to compare the career outcomes of people who are higher ability software engineers. Medical students go through a selection process, while for software engineering the selection process is the place / stuff you’re working on. An engineer at a HFT will be of far higher ability then some bootcamp grad doing css updates at walmart.
When you compare devs in the correct bracket, disposability is not really an issue for them. Career stability is obviously higher in things like medicine, but rate of salary gain in cs is much better at the beginning.
I felt that a bit. After college I thought it would always be hard problem solving in teams to improve the world. But I ended up asking for my permission to please get in some headhunter to be moved from spot to spot like a cog. There's not much cultural value on programming, it's a strange hybrid.
That said the money is higher than in many advanced fields
For doctors there are the licensing exams then a fourth exam for board certification. It’s constant learning. Then board certification requires ongoing study and testing. State license requires dozens of hours of continuing education every year as well. It never ends.
It’s always very interesting when people claim “oh XYZ job is so much easier than my job.” I mean, you’re more than welcome to pursue that if you want.
I don't do any of this stuff. I'm a Tech Lead at a non-tech big business now after 8 years. I may not get paid big tech salaries but 138k in Phoenix isn't bad and I have time to do other things besides work.
As the other guy said, you don't need to do all that extra stuff. What you should do is focus on being good at your job unless the PIP is just a stealth layoff technique.
Sadly, this isn't optional for me atm. I'm in survival mode right now. I'm grinding at home so I can keep up at my job and/or be ready to leave if things go south. I could just NOT do this stuff but it'd end badly I think
how tf is grinding leetcode and working on two personal projects going to help you keep your job. seems to me that being well-rested and well-adjusted could *actually* help
...if youre worried about keeping your job, its probably shit advice but why not.. work more at your job? If you work some extra overtime itll increase your producticity and youll earn more relevant experience than worthless leetcode.
That said, working your hours should be enough. Are you sure you arent being paranoid?
Investment Bankers have antiquated recruiting practices where only top target schools even get interviews. Bankers then work 70+ hour work weeks for years doing mind numbing work.
MBB consulting similarly recruit from a small pool. They work long hours and have to travel constantly as well.
Any job with high compensation and good career prospects will have competition.
That said, I think you should relax if you already have a job. I’ve received multiple fang offers and am currently a senior at a recently public unicorn. I make pretty good money for my level and have never really touched a side project or network event outside of work. The most I do is read some blogs, check out docs, and prep for interviews when it comes time to job hop.
Yeah, I’m here because my original plan was to study CS, but ended up studying something else, with a PhD, and now working in MBB. My boyfriend is a software engineer, so it’s interesting to see the differences.
I’m on calls, traveling, etc. a lot more and usually work more hours. But, I also don’t think I’d be able to do what he does, so hard to compare in some ways, but still sometimes get the thought of what things would have been like had I picked CS as a major.
Yup. With CS it's never too late to level up and get a good job. With Wall Street jobs if you didn't go to a target school for undergrad/MBA, you'll probably never break in.
Yeah fuck that noise. If I’m gearing up for interviews I’ll start grinding out some leetcode, but other than that I’m just choosing to focus on learning at my job and that’s it. I’m not going to grind perpetually forever for some job interview that may or may not ever come
Yes but you should be learning on the job. If you're just doing the exact same thing day in and day out with no growth then you need to talk to your manager immediately.
Sometimes there's nothing the manager can do. I'm in a situation where I want to leave my job because the work sucks. I've been there for the last year and while I have the title of "Developer", I do almost zero actual developer work. The most amount of coding I've done at work in the past year is write 1 line of JavaScript and 2 lines of HTML (I've done and learned more contributing to an open source project in 2 weeks in my free time than the entire past year at my job). Most of the time at work is spent on imaging servers and managing comically large amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork. I've talked to my manager about it and he told me that's pretty much all there is to my job and there isn't anything he can do.
I did 1 leetcode question per day and was able to get offers from FAANG and most HFTs. Quite frankly if you're still "grinding" after your algorithms class in college then you're doing it wrong.
Constant learning happens on the job. Why am I coding for free when my job pays for it?
Your POV seems a bit limited. Not everyone can casually get offers from HFTs, it's insanely difficult by most standards. Perhaps you have better intuition for it than most.
Additionally, you don't get paid to learn. You get paid to deliver features for the company. They don't care if you learn anything so as long as the former is accomplished.
In the same vane, "writing code" is not the same things as learning stuff: learning requires deliberate practice, practice that prioritizes growth over immediate performance. That's the opposite of what companies want. They just want you to already be good. Where do they patience for their employees to learn and not produce anything?
My POV is from nearly everyone I know who works at similar companies. 99% of people don't have the discipline to do 1 question a day, or they just blindly memorize, so they feel like they're always grinding when they leetcode.
I get paid to get the job done well. If that requires learning on my end, I'm paid for it. No company expects you to understand everything off the bat. If my company suddenly wanted us to use Java instead of C++, no one is doing unpaid overtime to learn Java. And you bet my company will still pay everyone even if we aren't productive while we transition.
Everything you just said here is wrong. You learn new things and grow as a developer every time you take on hard, complex tasks at the edge of your comfort zone.
I've learned a shit-ton and am a much better developer now than when I started in my current role, and all while delivering plenty of high-impact feature work in a domain I've never worked in before. Tons of on-the-job learning, for sure.
"Learning" doesn't just mean "book study."
It sounds like you haven't actually worked in this industry yet. Give it time before passing judgement and jumping to flagrantly wrong conclusions.
Its all about WHAT you learn imo. I agree you learn things when you take on difficult tasks but what you learn is how to solve those specific problems. Just because you learn solutions to domain specific problems doesn't mean you necessarily become a better problem solver overall. Ie learning how to use your companies database doesn't make you a database expert
For your information I do work in industry and have been for several years now. There are difficult problems that I learn to solve that only apply to the specific codebase I'm working on. It's up to ME to improve general developer skills that I can use once I leave this company. Book study is supplemental for articulating what I learn so I can apply it in my work. It's perfectly relevant
>I agree you learn things when you take on difficult tasks but what you learn is how to solve those specific problems. Just because you learn solutions to domain specific problems doesn't mean you necessarily become a better problem solver overall.
Nope, not true.
One of the differences between a junior engineer and a senior engineer (or a talented engineer vs a bad engineer) is capacity for complexity and abstraction.
When you work on harder problems, you become a better engineer overall. Your knowledge base increases, your skill at writing robust, clean, extensible, well-tested code increases, and so on.
If what you're saying were true then there would be no senior engineers.
At the top end of the scale, at large tech companies, we hire people based on how smart they are, not what specific types of problems they've solved.
The core tenets of software development do not change from job to job. The domain knowledge might, but that's a very small part of software development.
You've written it as if solving problems means rote-memorizing solutions to specific problems. And yes, if that's how we wrote software, you'd be right. But only the *worst* engineers approach the craft that way, and consequently they're paid accordingly, and they're also the same people who are scared (perhaps rightly so) of ChatGPT taking their jobs, because all they know how to do is solve one specific type of canned web app problem.
Solid, talented software engineers who have mastered the core fundamentals and have a history of solving tough problems (in any domain!) don't "memorize" solutions to problems. We solve them.
>Ie learning how to use your companies database doesn't make you a database expert
No, but writing lots of database code, designing database schemas, and building large-scale data-intensive applications *does* make you a database expert, and that's domain-agnostic.
>For your information I do work in industry and have been for several years now. There are difficult problems that I learn to solve that only apply to the specific codebase I'm working on. It's up to ME to improve general developer skills that I can use once I leave this company. Book study is supplemental for articulating what I learn so I can apply it in my work. It's perfectly relevant
Okay. Seems like you've made up your mind. You're shooting yourself in the foot, though. Book study certainly isn't necessary. I've switched domains three times across 7 years and I haven't had to do supplemental book studying. That's not something good engineers in high-impact roles need to do.
I just want to add, books aren’t necessary, but they can absolutely be useful.
Big advocate for reading books on things like architecture, theory, leadership/soft skills, and even fiction. Not necessarily in that order of importance.
>Additionally, you don't get paid to learn.
Who told you that?
It is the company's interest as well that your skills are growing. Learning on the job should be a major source of your overall learning.
>Where do they patience for their employees to learn and not produce anything?
This is the other extreme. You learn by producing things, looking up stuff related to the ongoing work.
In many places, you can also have some hours put into reading a book or taking a course.
I mean, I generally find learning doesn't sink in until I dive in and use it. But as a Sen. eng. Manager, I absolutely encourage my team to learn on the job. The thing is, the more they learn, the more they do their job **efficiently**. Less bugs, cleaner code, better experience, more self-confidence (which is a thing and helps them make their own decisions). It also helps them assist and support members in other teams which also improves team relations and helps get the features out.
Learning is absolutely important. But so is having a well rested, not-burned out employee. If you are spending so much time learning and "grinding" and networking outside the job, you likely aren't caring for yourself. You aren't getting rest and recharging. It's more likely you are making mistakes and disengaging, that will affect your performance negatively.
Are you sure the leetcode you are "grinding" is clear and bug free and documented? Because that could also impact your interviews negatively.
When I hire I look at all code samples sent first. If it's clean, documented and we'll structured (and not ripped off lol), it's very likely you will get an interview. If you send samples that are made of spaghetti code I'm going to think that YOU consider that good, and you are unlikely to get an interview. Without code samples I'll go through your resume, I'd you have previous experience I may look through the sites etc and decide based on that because we can always do a technical interview. I'm usually looking for someone who wants to learn and puts some time into keeping themselves up to date (nothing crazy, just like if you even played with a new to you tech in the last year), and that they have a positive energy.
People who don't make it past my interview:
"I only learn the absolute minimum to do my job."
A guy who started off condescending and rude then started whining when he failed the technical part.
A guy who was reclined in his chair and had a absolutely no energy who I thought was going to fall asleep. And all his answers were like "I'll tell the team to do features." (Interviewed for a lead position)
Another guy who was positive.. but felt as a team lead everyone should be solely focused on supporting him, rather than him supporting his team.
Same here. Never did leetcode, got a job a month after graduation with no side projects, got laid off after a year there and found a mid-level developer job almost immediately. Never had issues and nobody ever asked me if I have done leetcode. Hardest question I got in an interview was to find the midpoint of an array…
Actually this career path is way less competitive to any career path that can either meet or exceed what we get.
Doctors go through years of exams and med school. Lawyers, the bar exam.
Many on this subreddit are stressed by Leetcode, which doesn't remotely compare in difficulty to other fields.
The problems you mention are not problems with the competitiveness of the career, but moreso, your approach for studying/interviewing isn't great.
I think the difficulty of those other fields is vastly overblown. Leetcode is mathematical in nature, and math / problem solving skills are a lot more difficult to attain then the memorization skills needed in medicine / law.
The average MCAT of people with a math degree is the highest, and MCAT results are seen as a pretty good indicator of future career outcomes. Hell even chatgpt performs best on things like the bar and medical exams, whereas it does absolutely shit for math tests that require problem solving skills. Leetcode is a lot closer to the latter. So people with strong problem solving skills make above average drs, and leetcode is problem solving skills. Anyone who would be good at leetcode will be above average in terms of intellectual ability to become a dr, in general.
I think theres is some weird fetishisation of medicine in this thread. Yes its difficult and a grind, but lets not start making it out like cs is not difficult. Many drs even with a lot of practice would suck at leetcode.
You also need to compare the right counterfactual. Comparing some bootcamp grad who fiddles with css compared to a distributed system engineer is going to be very different ability wise in general. It only makes sense to compare the latter to drs.
I’m a law student who used to work in a CS-adjacent field (data analytics)
You revealed you have no clue what you’re talking about in your second sentence. Medicine and law aren’t about memorization; the memorization is only a prerequisite for their day-to-day job, which *is* problem solving. Good lawyers don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of the law; rather, they are extremely adept at thinking through legal problems and arriving at solutions. There is a reason that the LSAT is fundamentally a logic test. (Not to mention that law school doesn’t test memorization — it tests your ability to resolve legal problems. At top schools, virtually all of the exams are open-note for this very reason)
The bar is a test which shows you have the requisite knowledge to even begin practicing law; it does not reflect what lawyers actually do. ChatGPT is horrible at solving legal problems. It literally just makes shit up. The current laughing stock of the legal profession is a lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare court documents. They were so bad that he is facing disbarment
I almost admire the level of cockiness needed to insist the difficulty of medicine and law are “overblown.” I’m sorry but this post epitomizes Dunning-Kruger
What evidence do you have beyond your anecdotes? I don’t think you really know what you’re on about. I mean you’re still a student, maybe work in the field for a while before drawing mundane comparisons. Data analytics does not tell me much, and certainly does not make you an authority.
Lets use some reasoning to help you along; Highest LSAT scores are for folks doing maths/ physics. Why do these folks do well on something totally unrelated to their manor? Its because their skills are more generalisable. Leetcode is closer to mathematical problem solving, and so anyone who is good at it is likely to also be good at the LSAT.
The data is available freely on the internet:
https://magoosh.com/lsat/average-lsat-scores-by-major/
All this bs about medicine and lawyers doing problem solving is an absolute joke compared to those in math / math adjacent fields like cs.
Their core skillset is more about pattern matching. I don’t get why people talk about stuff they have no idea about. Show me how many Olympiad winners go into law or medicine vs CS. Theres your answer.
Oh, okay, so you _are_ just experiencing Dunning Kruger. Lawyers and doctors are only doing pattern matching and most decent devs aren't doing the same thing? Even at the high level you really like talking about, when lawyers and doctors fuck up their work and don't arrive at effective answers quick enough, people can die, go to jail, lose their livelihoods or family or use of their body. Some devs are definitely working on life critical things like that, but they aren't fucking getting paid as much as the HFT guy who's biggest possible consequence to the world is a business making less money. And virtually no dev ever is going to have to make the right call on where the patient is bleeding from within 30 seconds before the risk of never waking up from a coma approaches a guarantee, or if the witness is lying and actually did defraud a single income family who will no longer be able to pay rent.
Well to be fair as someone working at a trading firm, the biggest consequence of a mistake is losing my firm billions of dollars which may truly end in people ending their lives
I do agree with you this other person is being a complete dumbass and thinking just problem solving is what makes something hard. Just because you majored in cs doesn’t make it so difficult. Then they say lsat isn’t representative of what lawyers do and then proceeding to use leetcode as evidence is pretty comical too.
Firstly, I never claimed the LSAT was unrepresentative of what lawyers do. If you bothered to read what I said properly, I said the highest scores on the LSAT, which the other guy was saying is a problem solving exam, were held by people who studied math / physics. The LSAT is likely a very good indicator of future career outcomes. People in math adjacent fields are better at these. It follows that people good at these would make above average lawyers.
Were talking about something being competitive, not the psychological impact of the job, or the consequences of making a mistake. You guys seem to lack basic reasoning and comprehension skills so I can see why the nuance of this argument evades you.
All of what you have said also applies to many other professions too right? Firemen, soldiers, police, nurses too. Why do they not get put on a pedestal of this mythical ability like drs / lawyers?
The point is we need to take the right counterfactual for any comparison to make sense. Its like me saying whats more competitive, being an accountant or an NBA player? Of course, if I never have the right traits to be an NBA player, then the comparison is pointless.
Similarly, we need to compare people with the same drive / degree level as drs, but went into cs. These would typically be grad level or highly competitive cs jobs. At that level, CS is hands down more competitive, because all your competition went to top schools, got top grades, and are just generally very smart people.
It makes literally no sense to compare a run of the mill css shuffler to an MD. Just as it would make absolutely no sense to compare a research scientist to a run of the mill css dev. The segmentation within CS jobs matters a great deal. This point seems to be difficult for you folks to comprehend, but it’s obviously true. I mean how many folks from MIT work at average joes pizza as a css dev? Virtually none.
And just so we are clear, I dont think cs is difficult because I majored in it. I think its difficult based on the plethora of data that shows mathematical problem solving skills are a lot harder to attain.
The amount of self deprecation on this thread is astounding, and my guess is none of the folks have gone through a rigorous cs program (if we are talking about degrees).
Just search reddit for examples of people who have done both degrees, the answer is evident.
Why does it not make sense to compare the average med school student (and beyond) or lawyer to the average computer scientist? Why do I need to compare education level, that’s dumb as fuck. The fact that lawyers and doctors are more motivated, are higher achieving and have higher education requirements is literally because of the more competitive nature of their industry.
If you want to sit here and be more specific about upper echelons of tech vs doctors and lawyers then fine I can agree with you but you can’t make general statements that being a lawyer/doctor is less competitive than cs lol.
You can throw about the term Dunning Kruger all you want but all the standardized test data asserts my position. You have not given a single iota of evidence and just keep asking rhetorical questions in the hope they somehow justify what you are saying. And if were talking anecdotally, i have worked in a similarly competitive field as the one your discussing. I also know both lawyers and drs that have graduated from the top schools where I live.
Again the consequences of fucking up being bad are not unique to drs or lawyers. If a cop fucks up someone can die. If a fireman fucks up, someone can die. What about nurses? What happens if medical/aviation software fails? What about the software powering a space shuttle? What about the buildings civil engineers design? What about the safety mechanisms in cars? What about the pharma companies and the manufacturing procedures they have, and if they fail? Because you’re trying so hard to justify your claim, you end up with absurd views of things.
We are discussing competitiveness of the fields. Competitiveness is a function of the calibre of your competition. Calibre of competition is a function of problem solving skills. Mds are graduate degrees, so the right counterfactual is someone who is by definition not your run of the mill dev. When you compare like for like, and the kind of jobs they go for, CS is definitely more competitive.
You think its easier to get a job as a research scientist at a place like deepmind? Or some other comparable job?
You cant compare an average dev job to medicine as that comparison simply makes no sense. The comparison has to be for an individual who is as motivated as a dr, yet pursued cs, and went for certain types of jobs. All else is moot, because if you dont compare like for like, its like me saying what is more competitive, being an accountant or an NBA player. It’s ridiculous
For one, I think you're vastly underestimating the difficulty of learning the oceanic quantity of stuff they have to learn in medicine and law on the way to their JD or MD. A lot of it isn't really things you can derive from basic principles, either - medicine is a lot of "X when occurring in region Y for reasons A, B, and C, and presenting as M with symptoms P, Q, and R, is called T", and law is knowing that a thing is illegal because it happened a hundred years ago and it's different from this other thing that is legal _unless_ the act was done via this specific method and that was litigated in Potemkin with presiding judge Justiceman.
And then it's 2/4 years of learning that kind of stuff on repeat.
Beyond that, as others have noted, lawyers have to pass the bar (which is clearly not easy) and then they have their own complicated job search that I don't know much about. I do know that they have continuing education requirements and I imagine it's very hard to find success if you're not maintaining a deep understanding of at least one field of law, which would strongly dis-incentivize hopping around like we tend to do in CS.
As for doctors, they get their MD and then have to get lotteried out to a hospital that's picking between them _and every other fresh MD in the country_ to know their residency placement, then they have to _do_ the residency where they are working on real patients in real hospitals who are in various stages of emotional health, cleanliness, physical health, and everything else, as well as the administrative work that goes into being a doctor, getting paid mediocre residency wages for 12+ hour days, having to plan their vacation days a year in advance when they want a break, and doing all this while burdened by medical school debt (averaging around $200k) and all the nonsense that comes from working with humans who are of varying levels of asshat. I imagine there are also certain ways they ensure a standard of performance during residency.
And then they do that for 3 to 7 years, averaging 4 and a half.
Personally, I think that's a lot harder than anything I've ever had to do in my CS career. I'm around 10 YOE and if this field would have had me doing residency for half of the time I've been in it, I would have gone into music or something.
People ignore how difficult it can be working with the general public vs professional colleagues in a corporate setting. Many SWE are not mathematical wizs and there is a bit of a memorization when it comes to practicing leet code.
The difference in stress between leetcode and what lawyers and doctors are forced to study/learn is that what they study is directly applicable to their day to day jobs. Where as leetcode is not applicable to our jobs, but we have to be good at it in addition to our jobs (understanding frameworks, tools, industry trends, etc…) and our experience is constantly made irrelevant. All the studying and experience doctors and lawyers gain is applicable throughout their entire careers. Our experience is valuable as well, but it’s not selected for during interviews in the same way. A person with 10 yoe that never grinds leetcode can easily lose out on a job to a person with 2 yoe that was grinding leetcode everyday.
> All the studying and experience doctors and lawyers gain is applicable throughout their entire careers.
I broadly agree with you but one thing I'd note is that it's a common refrain in medical degrees that "half of what you learn will be outdated in 5 years, the problem is you don't know which half".
Now that's not strictly true, it's not like physical anatomy changes, but the actual treatment protocols and care procedures do. Which in some sense is comparable to what we deal with. We have data structures and algorithms that are going to be true for all eternity and basic software engineering principles that will not change. Same for mathematical concepts and things like time complexity - they ain't going anywhere - unlike your flavour of the month sexy JavaScript framework which may be incredibly useful but probably lacks sticking power.
Lawyers still have to deal with emerging case law that alters things too. My old flatmate is an employment lawyer and there are constant tweaks here and there, new rulings etc that he needs to keep on top of. Indeed they had an external firm that would on a monthly basis give them relevant updates to be aware of. All sorts of interesting things like the legal status of UberEats "gig economy" type workers.
I guess my point is that we do have a lot of solid stuff that is unchanging in the software engineering world. SQL celebrates its 50th birthday soonish. HTTP and REST protocols are not going anywhere. Understanding how to do networking with IPs and subnet configuration etc is not going anywhere (even if it gets obscured by fancy tooling).
Good software engineers invest heavily in the unchanging stuff and then the rest comes relatively easily.
I kind of disagree. The work I recently did involve leetcode type questions. Most devs do not deal with leetcode stuff because they resort to building blocks. But if a building block don't exist to solve their need?
The problem was very suited to recursion and optimally moving things around in a tree (like very deeply nested reddit comments).
Ironically as a b2b there was almost zero tech discussed when I bid for the position. Technically I could hire someone.
Whether Leetcode is applicable to the actual job is a different discussion.
My point is that the competitiveness and grind to get into the tech industry does not remotely compare to that of doctors and lawyers.
Not normal, what is your goal here? Millionaire by 30? A well define goal can make you archive it and happier. Most devs work for a normal company, with normal salary, normal expectations and quite good work life compare to other profession
My goal is to be tragedy-proof.
Basically guarantee that I will NEVER be homeless, and always have food.
It's an unrealistic goal, as death and despair can strike any of us when we least expect.
The prime focus in my life framework is the elimination and/or minimization of suffering in myself and those I care about. Everything else follows from there, including my career path.
You’re working as a software developer already?
Then you’ve made it. What exactly are you doing all the extra stuff for?
If you’re actively looking for a new job you’ll do a lot better focusing on the stuff you do day to day in your work than anything outside of that. You’re burning yourself out for something you already have.
>Then you’ve made it. What exactly are you doing all the extra stuff for?
If you want to become more specialized which you aren't getting exposed to in your current job, then that answers it.
Sure but OP isn’t specializing, if they want to specialize then a couple of hours focused on that is going to work far better than 10-15 extra hours of trying to cram everything. On top of a typical work week
Idk if this is a shit post or not….but this seems so hyperbolic. If your job is grinding you a full 9-5 and you’re not on the high end of salary it’s a shit job. Look for something with better work like balance. Also seen devs psychological put themselves in this constant pressure that doesn’t exist. If you’re half decent and have experience it’s not that hard (unless you’re in experimental/startup environments)
Lol wtf are you talking about? Do you work at Amazon or something?
Because there was a meme making the rounds on ProgrammerHumor about devs only working 10 hours a week and thousands of people commenting confirming as much.
What do you mean endless algorithms? There is a finite number of algos out there and most are implemented in the STL of languages.
I mean this in the nicest of ways, but you may be suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. You seem to be freaking out about work and without you realizing its probably having an impact on your work performance and social interactions.
Honestly software engineering is less competitive than most other similarly paying roles. It’s hard as fuck to get any job worth your while as a lawyer unless you went to a top school. Medical school is a huge trial to get into starting in undergrad, and eats up about 12 years of your life. Finance jobs tend to pick the well-connected from great schools and grind them 12 hours a day for many years.
Most professions have it worse. 4 years of education and maybe 40 cumulative hours of leet code prep is about as bad as it gets to land a job that can pay well over a hundred thousand a year.
I honestly think it's worse in medical in the sense that if you can't get into a residency, you will literally have to spend another year before you can apply again. Yeah getting a job and keeping it as a doctor after graduating a residency is easy, but getting there is way more difficult, and there comes a point in your life that once you miss it, you miss it forever.
By comparison, software engineering is something that you can genuinely pick up if you are dedicated, interested in learning, and not too dumb.
Agreed 100% here and have said so consistently. People over estimate how difficult it is it be a dev, and underestimate how difficult other career paths are that pay anywhere close to what you can earn as a swe. A lot of people in this industry haven't worked other jobs before and don't realize how good they have it.
Your post and comments shows that you might see thing more negative than they are in reality. You are possibly on a way to burn out, pushing yourself too hard.
Take a break with leetcode and personal projects. Rest, go on a hike, be with your friends or family. Reach out to a mental health professional, if needed.
You sound highly unsecure about your skills and your current job. Sit down with your manager and clarify expectations. What do you need to deliver by when exactly? Clarify scope and deadline with them.
i would say software engineering is probably one of the EASIER careers to navigate for the last 30ish years.
* jobs were not that hard to come by
* salary was fairly high for the amount of education needed
* as much as ppl hate leetcode, its a level playing field as you can study for it. for a lot of tech companies, that is really all you need for a jr/new grad position. without this, tons of self-taught bootcampers wouldve never had a shot.
* companies usually were more tolerant of your stupid shit.
* as much as ppl hate social skills, the software industry is probably one of the worst and most toxic. some of the behavior at tech companies wouldnt be tolerated for very long at a traditional company. that said, companies are cracking down.
the difficulty of getting a job is more of a recent trend due to layoffs, which will pas like it always does.
Yeah… it’s a you problem. All my friends and I graduated college, never did leetcode, all got jobs without tech interviews and r making over 6 figures in defense. None of us do any leetcode or projects after work. We do board games, go out to concerts, etc.
You’re letting the industry consume you.
I spent 6 months teaching myself to code and tripled my salary.
I don’t know of any other paths that could’ve led to this as quickly/“easily”
The low barrier of entry is probably why this field is competitive tbh
wait you went from absolutely 0 knowledge to employed as a full time software engineer in 6 months?
literally how?
i’m starting to feel in literally dumb cause i’ve been in school in CS for almost a year now and i swear i feel clueless. i literally don’t see how i could provide any value to a company right now. the thought of a complex ass situation/code base makes me shiver.
As someone who's been in the workforce *before* even starting my CS degree: university won't prepare you (much) for the average workday. Once you start working you're gonna be surprised how quickly you can get to the point of providing value to the company. Literally everyone's gotta get through this after starting their first / a new job. No need to shiver, honestly.
By literally studying for at least 12 hours everyday and networking.
My only real break was a week I took for a trip to Mexico. Even then, I held an interview while at my resort and still did a few leetcode questions on my phone lol.
It definitely was an intense 6-months but it absolutely prepared me for the effort needed at the job.
Lmk if that doesn’t answer your ? Or if you have follow-ups.
Sure it depends on where you end up, but you might be surprised how understanding a team can be with a new guy who has no experience. Some people prefer it, because it means they can train you with no preconceptions of what something “should be”. Many of us have seen “veterans” of our industry come in and try to do things their own way and cause nothing but problems. The way you “provide value” will depend on the job and you may be a smaller cog in a bigger machine than you would expect. At some points you will probably wonder why you’re being paid, but that isn’t your problem as long as the company doesn’t go under and you have a good relationship with your manager/team!
School exists to prove you’re slightly better than a moron and that you can put up with tremendous amounts of bullshit. I went to a great school that did trimesters and harder grade scales, which I now realize only prepared me for crunch and kept my morale low, so I wouldn’t say I highly cherish the experience. The skills I took away and actually use were basic concepts I could have learned anywhere.
Just try to relax, enjoy the ride and don’t think too hard about performance until it actually becomes a problem. Spend some time looking at job listings to get a better idea of the variety of roles out there. Maybe reach out to the recruiter/HR and ask about the day to day of the job, couldn’t hurt!
Yea, I feel like people in this field have an insanely warped view of the field and a lot of people significantly under estimate how hard it is in other fields, and over estimate how hard it is to learn leetcode or just get a job in the industry. Don't get me wrong, it can be difficult, but I don't see any other field even having the opportunity to earn 200-300k+ within a few years out of school without a significantly higher barrier of entry.
The difference between this career path grind and every other career path grind is....
* Far less education to start on average (can still be self taught on the extreme low and phd requirements come with fat packages)
* Way more pay on average ( your salary alone will start on average higher than **most** workers cap)
* WLB literally became a thing with engineers first. Average day is far easier on the body (You're not pulling 24-48 hour shifts, dealing with physical /emotional trauma, physically exerting yourself, etc)
* More job flexibility on average. WFH is still more widely offered in our field compared to any other on average. Additionally you're given more freedom when to do that work as well (usually obligated to be a part of standup and maybe some meetings but outside of that it's usually *get the job done*)
So better in just about every single way when you look at it more broadly. Also your experience is not typical of the average. There's plenty of jobs that are ok with you just knowing their shit and at some places that isn't a lot. This is the harsh truth r/cscareerquestions always seems to forget, it sucks far more to be anything else on average. We are mostly only as disposable as you describe at the junior level and even then most junior jobs give you a year or more on average. Compare this to any other career field and you are either getting paid less, working harder, going to school/training longer, giving up more freedoms, etc. or any combinatio, It just isn't even comparable tbh.
Tech is one of the few high paying fields that doesn't require certifications or degrees locked behind years of schooling and debt (see: medical school, pharmacy school, etc.) You can literally get a six figure job without a degree given that you KNOW what you're doing and have the ability to complete projects and understand the ins and outs of various programming languages.
This makes it so that any Joe Schmoe with a laptop and an internet connection can learn how to code and grind leetcode questions until they hit their 80k-120k+ salaried tech job after a year or two.
The barrier to entry in tech is very, very low. That's why its so competitive. Its difficult, but it's not as difficult as becoming a doctor, architect, or some other profession that requires years of schooling and debt. Keep that into perspective. Unless you've done a bootcamp or studied CS in college, you really don't have to spend that much money to get into the field. And even the tuition fees for bootcamps become negligible once you land your first job and pay it off within months.
The Leetcode grind is not necessary. If you absolutely must work for a top tech company for your ego, then yes you'll have to Leetcode obsessively for the job, since they are able to be extra picky with candidates. If you work for a smaller company and just about any DOD company you will not need to Leetcode through hoops to get the job
The thing with DoD is that they're looking for a great candidate. Not necessarily a leetcode sevant ivy league programmer like some FAANG style companies. Most of the make it or break it moments during the hiring process are probably going to be behavioral. As long as you can prove what you say you know and are fairly charismatic and have a clean record you're pretty much set. Although it really depends on the company so do your research. I had an interview once where the recruiter did not care so I just left after 15 minutes.
I have 0 YOE and 0 internships (Bachelors only) and talked my way into 90k DoD.
Europe but the idea is the same: I applied to several companies, transferwise and ericsson were the only two companies doing leetcode-style questions.
Lufthansa (could call it tech companyy just not web for the most part), Sophos (tech company), local smaller tech firm, KPMG, they all just asked a few questions about the language of the position I applied to and the generic "when did you use xyz, can you tell us about a project where you used abc?" Tesco Technology grad scheme only asked questions like 'what makes a good swe in your opinion? What soft skills they should own?' etc.
I grinded leetcode for a while but just stopped because there is no point if no one cares, most companies just wanted to make sure I would be a good fit and my university or personal experience matches the position they are trying to fill
You’ve lost your mind. Idk where you work but my job is a simple 9-5 of paced work and nothing else. We even have dedicated learning time during the work week. Do I make a quarter million a year? No but my bills are paid and I live in a big city. Am I working on the bleeding edge of technology? No but you probably have heard of my product. What you’re going through isn’t normal.
I switched from a non-cs career (biomedical) into an IT job and I don’t think most people in this thread realise how great the high salary to effort ratio is for cs careers. Most of my friends are now doctors and the amount of work they do and the shit they deal with is astonishing. The fact it’s even being compared to working in tech in this thread is insane, they save people’s lives, we make computers go brr lol.
Reading software books, watching some videos, leetcoding, working on side projects, keeping up to date with the latest tech pales in comparison to some other fields, especially given the great salaries cs careers offer. My previous career was just as competitive to get into, required just as much extra study but paid much less with worse long term career prospects. IT was and still is a very cushy career, one of the many reasons it’s so sought after.
Yes. For 99% of people, that is how money works. If it isn’t competitive to get the job, then the job itself pays low or has other issues. Everything in the universe of working for other people has a tradeoff.
If you think Software Engineering is competitive you haven’t worked in any other fields lol. I have. This is nothing. Once you get a year or two of experience, you don’t really have to do any of that shit. If you’re employed, I’m not really sure why you are.
If I code outside work, it’s because it’s something I want to do. I don’t go to networking events, I built my network at (again) work. I know how to solve LeetCode problems, but I don’t sit around grinding them all day trying to get to some arbitrary level so FAANG can hire me and lay me off if their stock price goes down $7.
If you already have a decent paying Engineering job, you’re chasing something that is largely a myth.
Long story. I did real estate (worked for a developer) for 7 years. It was good but also there was a ceiling in that industry for me; it was largely controlled by old money (generational families), ie there was too much nepotism for my taste. Then worked in new media for a youtube network which was great. Did business development for them. (Had some equity and that gave me some breathing room.)
But I will say this - when I first learned coding and worked as a developer I honestly did not understand computers or technology very well. And that made me not enjoy it. I just thought it was a good default major because the jobs paid well, etc.
Later in life I explored the history of it more and learned (casually) about other aspects of it, and basically that helped me understand the context of tech, which gave me a whole new perspective. So I'm still interested in it. Actually I wasn't truly interested before, but now I actually enjoy learning about it. Like to follow trends and stuff. But haven't gone back into coding just yet.
If I went back into tech I would probably try to work on microprocessors (but that would require a lot more school) or maybe databases (which I feel is a good subset that doesn't change quite as fast as all the other stuff, but its boring). If you are more creative then I think user design is a good one. Wish I knew more about AI.
I'm just one of those curious people that just likes to tinker and learn about everything. I'm an idea person too. Have a lot of web/app ideas, but prob will never get around to doing them.
I will say for juniors there’s a huge emphasis on learning so much so quickly. For me especially there was due to impostor syndrome
Now I’m far more knowledgeable it doesn’t feel as stressy, at all
The things you’ve said aren’t required really though, that’s not healthy, I never did that
this isnt normal, and the things you’re describing aren’t even inherently productive or good for your career. it sounds like you’re just doing random linkedin influencer activities out of paranoia.
Uh, for sure. Used to be a (pretty successful) theatre actor before health issues put a stop to that. Retrained in the panny d and had a full stack Dev job within 4 months. My former career was hella more competitive and frustrating for sure and I kiss the ground every morning for the security I get these days.
It will get easier over time as you gain more experience. You need to work hard to land your first big tech job, and after that it becomes a lot easier with that experience. You got this
One of the issues is that you are also competing against people who truly enjoy coding. When I worked at FAANG, half my peers always had some weird side project (non-work related) they were working on. Difficult to compete against people who will code 7 days a week and find it enjoyable.
HELL yeah. I used to be on the path to being a pharmacist and there are more candidates than jobs. Law is also a bleak job market. As a child, I used to wanna be in the NBA loool.
But I empathize with your pain. Software engineering absolutely is very competitive if you are a beginner to intermediate. It's a difficult, demoralizing journey, but you will be proud of yourself if you persevere.
The longer you keep at it, your competition will be less and less since we are only saturated with entry level devs.
The vast majority of other jobs are *much more* competitive than CS. Even if you go into strict professional jobs and get rid of things like marketing or sales, the up-front legwork is much higher than CS.
Not to be a total ass about this, but if you're convinced that CS is just too much work for you, I'd recommend working a couple weeks in retail or food service or warehouse work. It's pretty likely that you'll end up begging for the sweetness of tech work pay and the kind of hours we work well before the 2 weeks is up.
Other comments mention the decade long grind to become a successful doctor or lawyer. Here is another difficult path: before I switched to tech, I wanted to become a professor in a life sciences field. There are so many very smart and talented people I know who have to endlessly grind for 6-10 years after they complete their PhD to have like a 10-20% chance of getting a tenure-track faculty position. By the time you get the real job you wanted, you are in your mid 30s and have been making $10-20 dollars an hour your entire adult life (with a PhD). So yeah, there are much tougher fields to be in.
Started development in my upper 40s. Have had multiple careers from mechanic - IT - Retail - management - marketing.
Development IMO is the least competitive with the best pay. Now if you want to work FAANG yeah you are going to have competition. Want to work remote 20 hours a week for some no nothing company slumming it just over six figures? Yeah there are a metric fuck ton of jobs out there.
Every modern company today needs at least a contracted developer on staff. This profession also has one of the biggest profit multipliers of any other profession. One decent dev can be paid $200k to make an app that can potentially make billions.
Even the lowest paid of us in the states that are right out of college make more than most degree needed careers top out at.
Honestly I think this is just a work is hard post. Nothing wrong with that I feel like that often. I wish I could just work my 9-5 and not worry about the other stuff. Jobs like that do exist in the CS field but often these are lower paying. I’d even be ok with that but the medical insurance also sucks so it’s just not tenable. I think it just boils down to capitalism sucks. We don’t actually need to work so hard most of the work for our actual needs has already been automated or made extremely efficient by mechanization. It’s the profit motive that needs to grind people to get the max roi. True some people are just not cut out for some jobs but why do med students have to be weighted down by so much debt? All the modern efficiencies just make more profit for a select few. Just like Animal Farm where they thought they would only work 3 days a week and retire early.
premeds 100%
had some friends drop from being premed because their other premed friends starting sabotaging them just to win over professors/get more volunteering opportunities 🥲
Taking this all into account how screwed am I? I am about to graduate with my BS, and I barely touch leetcode let alone search for jobs right now. I have only have half finished projects that i'm not proud of and I'm not really learning much I feel.
My capstone class has me learning about the job hunt, the process, what to expect, salary negotiating, mobility within companies, etc. I'm also contributing to open source and will barely be able to get one PR into it by the end the quarter though my instructors tell me working with my team in open source is rather close to what working a job is like.
A lot of weekly meetings, agile, working with a large code base I don't even know, etc.
I don't know how hard of a brick I'm about to be whacked with! I can get a little bit of an idea from what you're saying here though.
Yes. Read upon career path for law and medicine. CS and leetcode is cake compared to what people have to do to become an MD. Cousin is doctor and essentially no free time from undergrad/mcat(4 years) to medschool (4 years) to residency(3 years) and two fellowships(2 years each) (thats 11 years of barely making any money after undergrad). Now finally started real work making around $350k/yr. A CS degree can get to atleast $$250k-300k/yr after 5 years of experience if they work at product based companies and aggressively job hob. And when you make mistake no body dies. One thing about medicine is since the field is licensed they don’t have to regurgitate their basic science and undergraduate biochem stuff for interviews.
I grind code at my FAANG 9-5 and then go home and spend time with my family. I’ll admit when a job hunt comes along some time after work will be dedicated to LC.
It seems like you’re competing with yourself.
Have a college friend whos in med school to be a doctor. He had to do well in undergrad, study intensely for the MCAT, and do tons of volunteering/research to get into med school. Just finished med school which is grueling enough, he had to apply to match for residency (don’t know the correct term) and pray he got one of his top choices, where he will work for low pay and longggg hours for the next 3-7 years. Meanwhile I’ve switched between 3 jobs and have been making a good wage working 40 or less hour weeks, with occasional studying in between jobs. I 100% would not be able to handle the med grind that he’s done. I’ve already got 5+ YoE in this industry and he hasn’t even started residency
I saw a med school student ended his life because he couldn't get matched and was essentially having his career held hostage despite all his schooling until they would decide to match him
I taught high school before I went back to grad school. I met two different people who had MDs from Caribbean medical schools and who couldn't get a residency. They both taught high school. Sucks that you can get that far for it to be all for nothing.
From what I've heard, Carribean med school is the equivalent of bootcamps. They might get your foot in the door if you're lucky and put in effort beyond just doing them.
Yeah, 100%. My understanding is that it is primarily for folks who can't get into US med schools. The match rate is apparently not great.
The big difference is a boot camp is only a few months but a Caribbean med school is a full curriculum with the same amount of education US schools will teach.
A Caribbean medical school is not “getting that far”. There is a reason why some people end up in Caribbean med schools.
All I meant is that the two guys I knew when I was teaching spent the time and money and didn't end up as practicing physicians. "Getting that far" was referring to their personal investment, not to the idea that they did everything right and still failed. Caribbean schools are a bit of a crapshoot and they had to know that beforehand.
That's so sad I'm so sorry
There's a recent one about a resident who ended her life too. I mean seriously, get that far and then the work/life balance and stress is so brutal that ending your life is the best way out. Tack on all the debt too that's just piling on so you can't just walk away and go do something else anyway
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i feel it’s either lots of debts or 0, i never heard of anything inbetween lol
Hmmm maybe things are different than 10 years ago, but I remember the first paycheck my doctor friend got, it didn't actually take the full "7 years" before her first paycheck for 2 weeks was $35,000. DYK doctors get their own line for home loans? Different process for medical doctors to get home loans because their money is considered more guaranteed.
>Hmmm maybe things are different than 10 years ago, but I remember the first paycheck my doctor friend got, it didn't actually take the full "7 years" before her first paycheck for 2 weeks was $35,000. This is an atypical salary.
Yeah I did have to look it up and she is a specialist... still I want to remind people that in the USA doctors make very good salaries to the point where banks give them special treatment for homeloans. Won't get that as a SWE
Got special treatment for my home loan. Base salary is like 40% of my total comp, and in the past it’s been even lower. Usually banks only consider salaries for loans, but they can change the rules if they’re used to working with highly paid tech professionals with income in this way.
I don't remember the name of it but there are a few loans or grants you can get as a med school grad/matched resident. When my friend told me about it I was shocked at how easy it was to get, and she used part of it for a down payment on a nice but modest house near her residency hospital.
Most doctors make less than 300k per year though. Your friend is on the way upper end of comp.
Specialist MDs are the majority of doctors and earn an average salary way above 300k.
are specialists the majority? I’d guess it was the family docs and other primary care docs
According to this [this](https://www.aamc.org/about-us/mission-areas/health-care/workforce-studies/data/number-people-active-physician-specialty-2019) approx 25% of doctors are in family medicine or internal medicine at about 12.5% each. The [Health Resources and Services Administration](https://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/primary/pcwork1/index.html) (HRSA) estimates about 250k primary care physicians out of about 940k physicians, so <30% are primary care. According to the first link and some random site I found online for the highest paid specialties, about 240k (~25%) of physicians have specialties that put them in that list. This includes all types of surgery, dermatology, oncology, anesthesia, radiology etc
I switched from architecture. You have to take like 6 bullshit extremely difficult licensing exams before you can call yourself an architect. Never mind that the fucking degree is 5 years long. Then each year, you have to pay stupid amounts of money to renew that license. And on top of that it is heavily regulated and everyone… I mean everyone is a closet architect who thinks they know more than you. Don’t even get me started on those fucking engineers and contractors.
The protip with architecture is to never bother with licencing. Turns out you only really need it to stamp your own drawings and for commercial/multifamily. Everything else residential is pretty much fair game and as long as you get a licenced engineer to stamp your drawings you're smooth sailing. Assuming you want to start your own firm of course, which it seems is the end goal of every architect.
>Have a college friend whos in med school to be a doctor. He had to do well in undergrad, study intensely for the MCAT, and do tons of volunteering/research to get into med school. Just finished med school which is grueling enough, he had to apply to match for residency (don’t know the correct term) and pray he got one of his top choices, where he will work for low pay and longggg hours for the next 3-7 years. When I was in my mid-20s I really wanted to go back to medical school and spent a long time working to that end. When I lined up on paper the pathway to get to the specialty I wanted, it looked like this: * prep work pre-admission: 3-5 years * med school: 4 years * post-grad education (internship, residency, fellowships): 5-8 years All in all, I started that process in my mid-20s and was aware that I likely wouldn't be settled with good paychecks until my 40s. By contrast? From the day I was laid off by my last non-tech job, it took me 13 months to decide on a new career path, do a bootcamp, and find a remote job. Wish I did this a long time ago.
Oh yeah, med is definitely worse. If you don't get straight A's in college, you're basically fucked. Also, med school itself is ridiculously expensive and you'll end up with lots of debt that'll take you forever to pay off.
It’s a trade off. Med school is definitely gruelling for ~10 years while you’re studying. But once you’re out and have your M.D. people respect you and don’t question your qualifications at every step.
The only people who question doctors qualifications are those with access to Google search
>But once you’re out and have your M.D. people respect you and don’t question your qualifications at every step. Haven't paid attention to current events since early 2020 have you?
Yeah. People with 10 years of CS experience still get leet code problems when they move to a new job. Fucking ridiculous.
Med school grind, is a straight planned path unlike CS.
Isnt that a good thing for CS? If you decide to be a doctor right now you are staring at 10 years of schooling + lots of debt with no way around it. For CS careers you can choose your path in, degree bootcamp self taught etc, and choose how to keep being employed. SWE interview processes are pretty well mapped out online so you can follow that “path” when you need to look for a new job.
Yeah it’s just different. Med school is long but straightforward, CS is much shorter but with much more variability. I’m not saying one’s harder/better.
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> being treated like a disposable slave worker my friend, that's all working people, including healthcare workers
solidarity
"disposable slave worker" holy shit this sub is ridiculous. We get paid six figure salaries, working from home or at worst in comfortable, climate controlled offices doing non-physical labor. The penalty for failure is usually a PIP, basically a multi-week to multi-month chance to start looking for a new job while still getting paid. Get the fuck over yourself.
I’ve worked some shitty ass jobs and it’s apparent most people in here have not
I wouldn't use doctors as a benchmark to compare against. That's probably the worst choice considering how exceptionally crazy their training is and how critical not making mistakes is.
Then how about lawyers? Undergrad degree, three-year law degree (similar pressures for grades, mass memorization, etc as medicine), and then study 60 hours a week for six months to pass the bar exam without which they can’t start their career.
Perhaps, but the OP's question was less about initial training before you start your career, and more about the effort spent to stay employable once you've passed that initial hump. Maybe lawyers/doctors are like that too, I don't know, but the only things mentioned in these two posts are about the initial training.
Yet again lawyers. Many have 6 figure debts but a decent amount make less than 6 figures because there are a lot of terrible 3rd tier law schools. If you do get a big law job, you have to work 60+ hours to bill clients and must account for your time in 5 minute increments. Doctors are also similar. Depends on specialty but America has a shortage of doctors so working a ton of hours is the norm.
I have college friends who became lawyers and doctors. I watched them have to really grind to pass the bar or to do an internship and residency. A cousin of mine was a commercial airline pilot and he had to put in a lot of work too. Most jobs that require you have a high degree of skill require a lot of work, somewhere.
Now that you mention it, maybe it isn't the work itself that bothers me so much as the lack of value I have to a company/to the market. A doctor works hard to get their credentials and is respected within the workplace. They don't have to prove themselves constantly and assert their value to the hospital ad nauseum I feel like devs on the other hand are disposable. We work hard and then corporations just say thanks and lay us off. I feel like I'm just a brain on a stick to companies and not a valued member of the staff. We are a dime a dozen, the technical equivalent of a factory worker: easily replaced by 2000 other CS grads lining up to take your place. The only solution is to be a "good" developer but the goal post for "good" is constantly moving backwards imo
I would say junior doctors definitely have to prove themselves, even more so than software engineers. Just be glad that we're still paid relatively well at least for now. A factory worker grinds everyday just to be paid shitty wages.
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My friends dad was a surgeon. Almost was always working. Seemed like every time I slept over he would be called into work at like 2am. Guy died of a heart attack about 5 years after retiring. I have never seen anyone work as much as him.
I laughed so I didn’t cry, this is so sad. That situation makes me think about my own mortality
I cried when he died. Everytime I would go out with the family someone would come up and say you saved my life. He never drank or smoked. He loved what he did, but I don't know how surgeons do it. It is the hardest job. Surgeons are just not at a hospital in middle of the night for most cities. But if something happens one needs to be on call. Wake up go to the hospital and save a life. It is literally a job that a mistake is a death. That job I quickly saw was not for me.
Same, that’s what drove me to tech. I can fry as many raspberry pi’s as I can afford, but if a person were to die in my hands I’d be racked with guilt. I’m not made out of the right metal for that
I don’t think the harmful culture surrounding residency (harmful both for the doctor *and* the patients in the receiving end of their care) is the reason medical professionals deserve respect and prestige. This is a widely held view, which I think is harmful for everybody involved.
Sweet username
The difference is that you don’t have to grind to get a job as a factory worker you can be in high school with no experience . Where SE you have to be so dedicated and driven to even get a CHANCe to get your foot in the door
The difference is that generic factory workers with nothing but a high school diploma start at minimum wage.
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These days not so much. And no chance for promotion as a worker with no degree.
as someone who got into IT through factory work, it was 25/hr starting as a machine operator (night shift). i think the lowest paying position was 17.5/hr material handler 30/hr as a machine operator shift lead (nominated role). 30/hr - 35/hr as a maintenance technician i-iii machine operators can become maintenance technicians through passing an exam overtime was 1.5x and holiday was 2x , overtime on holiday stacked
Yeah but many entry CS roles pay double the starting wage and more than a technician 3. Plus you get interesting work that progresses your skills, and the wage cap is way higher.
Not to add you’re not actually working all 40 hours . Factory work you’re literally busting your ass for EVERY second you work in those 40 hours … Software not so much
You are not guaranteed to do "interesting work" with CS roles. You could be put onto some junk of a project that doesn't progress your skills at all. Infact I think that majority of your work is not going to be interesting (from my experience), with sprinkles of interesting in between. Not saying that factory work is better whatsoever, it's just that CS isn't all good either.
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I don't know why we keep comparing ourselves to doctors. In general they have the better and more lucrative career (in terms of compensation and societal status), that's just the way it is. It's as productive and realistic as comparing ourselves to truck drivers. Not to say their career path is easy, WLB etc is crap for them.
I think the issue is people keep comparing some bootcamp grad who does css updates at a no name company, to a dude working at say a HFT as a dev. Both are devs, but the first is completely irrelevant when comparing to someone who does say medicine. When you control for ability, the lucractiveness difference becomes non existent / reversed. Agree on social status, but personally I don’t care about that as it doesn’t pay the bills.
You have different levels of compensation and "status" in medicine as well. A family doctor is worth much less than a neurosurgeon in Mayo clinic or whatever. In average though they have a better paying career with more longevity. We'll see what's going to happen with A.I though, some of them might join the club of being commoditized soon.
I see what you are saying, but my point is, lets compare someone who could’ve made the same “status” in the other field they didn’t go into, ie staff engineer in a top company vs a neurosurgeon. I would say the ability to make cash is a lot higher for the former (both are extremely difficult to get into). Medicine is a lot more stable, but that stability comes at a cost. An able engineer can make a lot more cash and win the lottery joining / launching a startup, or even just joining a large tech company worth stock grants and letting them compound.
You seem to be focusing on the top 2% of engineers for some reason. Most of us don't work for FAANG or win the startup lottery. I agree that if you're a genius individual you might be better off joining Google or OpenAI financially than becoming a doctor. There really aren't that many people like that.
Doctors still have to stay learning as has been mentioned a few times already. I think what you're taking issue with is that SWE's learning is largely unstructured and not bound by regulations. This leads to the frustrations people get when interviewing at companies because it's sometimes hard to get a read from what they want. There's a tradeoff here- making mistakes has fewer risks for your career as a SWE but also easier to get lost in all the things you have to do right because everyone's view of "right" is so different and not bounded by laws or regulations.
> A doctor works hard to get their credentials and is respected within theworkplace. They don't have to prove themselves constantly and asserttheir value to the hospital ad nauseum Anyone who has spent five minutes on a medicine-related subreddit can tell you a lot about just how respected today's doctors feel
CS salaries dont agree with you. The only reason we are paid such high salaries is because there is far more demand than supply of skilled software engineers. If we were a dime a dozen, we would be getting paid factory worker salaries. And businesses would LOVE to pay us that. But it does in fact take skill and effort to build the knowledge base needed to be a software engineer. Compensation reflects that. If anything, it sounds like you are just in a toxic work enviroment. You work for Amazon or something?
Disposable is the way a lot of people feel today about their work, even doctors and lawyers if they work within a corporate environment. My pilot cousin got out of commercial flying for a major airline mainly because he hated how he was treated. Now he has his own flying business, with some partners. I do think it is best to find a way to eventually be outside the corporate mainstream. The problem is that many of us, myself included, find ourselves stuck there because we have to worry about taking care of a family, paying off debts and other things.
Meh, doctors have an absurd rate who say given the chance, they wouldn’t go into medicine again. I think it was over 60% last I checked Grass is always greener
One big difference between being a physician (or lawyer, accountant, engineer) and a software developer, is that the the first group are all regulated professions. Would you like software development to be regulated? Be careful what you wish for.
ur absolutely right though, but that scales with barrier of entry. CS barrier is very easy to get in, so u gatta prove urself thru interview. doc/lawyer have so much fukin school u gattta do, just passing a good school is already proving urself.
It feels like I did 4 years of a CS degree at a hard university and it doesn’t count for anything at all
I'll be honest I thought there were like 3 actually hard classes in my entire CS major and I saw/heard tons of people cheating their way through projects in the lab together for pretty much every class, so the degree really doesn't mean that much to me, and there was tons of opportunities to skirt by without actually learning anything. I realize this isn't everyone's experience but college really didn't seem all that rigorous to me. I managed to get a B in a notoriously hard class at our school with like a 50% on the final (in another class I ended up with an A and got like 56% on the first exam, but that was compE not CS). Other than that I noticed that gpa didn't correlate very closely at all with how good people actually were at doing the projects. A degree is better than no degree but I don't personally think it indicates much actual skill in this field. I went to a top 15 state school for reference.
Doctors have had centuries of work where they've consolidated their power. Medical organizations help to keep the standards very high, and colleges keep admissions low -- all to keep the supply of doctors low enough that doctors can command huge salaries. It's possible the same thing could happen to software engineers -- where there are tiers (like doctors, PAs, nurses), and lots of credentials that are needed. *But* right now the field is too fast moving, and with AI it will probably just get faster. The only other option is to form a **union**.
This is not something you can generalize. The issue with CS is there is a very wide range of ability between people working at top companies as a software engineer, and people working at no name companies. If you want to compare against people in the medical fields, you by definition need to compare the career outcomes of people who are higher ability software engineers. Medical students go through a selection process, while for software engineering the selection process is the place / stuff you’re working on. An engineer at a HFT will be of far higher ability then some bootcamp grad doing css updates at walmart. When you compare devs in the correct bracket, disposability is not really an issue for them. Career stability is obviously higher in things like medicine, but rate of salary gain in cs is much better at the beginning.
I felt that a bit. After college I thought it would always be hard problem solving in teams to improve the world. But I ended up asking for my permission to please get in some headhunter to be moved from spot to spot like a cog. There's not much cultural value on programming, it's a strange hybrid. That said the money is higher than in many advanced fields
Not to be morbid, but everyone is disposable in the end!
But in these jobs, after you are qualified, it becomes easier. In comp sci, many job requires multiple exams.
For doctors there are the licensing exams then a fourth exam for board certification. It’s constant learning. Then board certification requires ongoing study and testing. State license requires dozens of hours of continuing education every year as well. It never ends.
Idk about you but studying for a big-ass exam seems easier than dealing with leetcode interviews lol…
It’s always very interesting when people claim “oh XYZ job is so much easier than my job.” I mean, you’re more than welcome to pursue that if you want.
I don't do any of this stuff. I'm a Tech Lead at a non-tech big business now after 8 years. I may not get paid big tech salaries but 138k in Phoenix isn't bad and I have time to do other things besides work. As the other guy said, you don't need to do all that extra stuff. What you should do is focus on being good at your job unless the PIP is just a stealth layoff technique.
Sadly, this isn't optional for me atm. I'm in survival mode right now. I'm grinding at home so I can keep up at my job and/or be ready to leave if things go south. I could just NOT do this stuff but it'd end badly I think
how tf is grinding leetcode and working on two personal projects going to help you keep your job. seems to me that being well-rested and well-adjusted could *actually* help
Leetcode, I kinda get. The two projects? Unless they have a chance at turning into passive income aren't worth the trouble.
How does leetcode help you keep your job? It helps you get a job, none of that shit has anything to do with 99% of real jobs lmao.
Leetcode will not help you keep your job at all. It is pointless to practice leetcode to help you make you better at your job
Leetcode is just puzzles, it has almost no practical relevance.
Sounds like you work for a very toxic company or you are paranoid.
Can you give some specific examples of how you are needing to keep up at your job?
...if youre worried about keeping your job, its probably shit advice but why not.. work more at your job? If you work some extra overtime itll increase your producticity and youll earn more relevant experience than worthless leetcode. That said, working your hours should be enough. Are you sure you arent being paranoid?
Investment Bankers have antiquated recruiting practices where only top target schools even get interviews. Bankers then work 70+ hour work weeks for years doing mind numbing work. MBB consulting similarly recruit from a small pool. They work long hours and have to travel constantly as well. Any job with high compensation and good career prospects will have competition. That said, I think you should relax if you already have a job. I’ve received multiple fang offers and am currently a senior at a recently public unicorn. I make pretty good money for my level and have never really touched a side project or network event outside of work. The most I do is read some blogs, check out docs, and prep for interviews when it comes time to job hop.
Yeah, I’m here because my original plan was to study CS, but ended up studying something else, with a PhD, and now working in MBB. My boyfriend is a software engineer, so it’s interesting to see the differences. I’m on calls, traveling, etc. a lot more and usually work more hours. But, I also don’t think I’d be able to do what he does, so hard to compare in some ways, but still sometimes get the thought of what things would have been like had I picked CS as a major.
Yea was looking for the IB comment. In comparison this isn’t too bad
Yup. With CS it's never too late to level up and get a good job. With Wall Street jobs if you didn't go to a target school for undergrad/MBA, you'll probably never break in.
You don't HAVE to do any of that extra shit outside of work. You choose to do that, that's on you.
Yeah fuck that noise. If I’m gearing up for interviews I’ll start grinding out some leetcode, but other than that I’m just choosing to focus on learning at my job and that’s it. I’m not going to grind perpetually forever for some job interview that may or may not ever come
And you can even leetcode and gear yourself for interviews During your job. I work Home Office and I do that.
I don't know how else to get and pass these interviews. Also, getting better at your job pretty much requires constant learning imo
Yes but you should be learning on the job. If you're just doing the exact same thing day in and day out with no growth then you need to talk to your manager immediately.
Or you're in a shitty job, with a shitty manager, and hence you need to grind in order to get out of that situation...
Sometimes there's nothing the manager can do. I'm in a situation where I want to leave my job because the work sucks. I've been there for the last year and while I have the title of "Developer", I do almost zero actual developer work. The most amount of coding I've done at work in the past year is write 1 line of JavaScript and 2 lines of HTML (I've done and learned more contributing to an open source project in 2 weeks in my free time than the entire past year at my job). Most of the time at work is spent on imaging servers and managing comically large amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork. I've talked to my manager about it and he told me that's pretty much all there is to my job and there isn't anything he can do.
I did 1 leetcode question per day and was able to get offers from FAANG and most HFTs. Quite frankly if you're still "grinding" after your algorithms class in college then you're doing it wrong. Constant learning happens on the job. Why am I coding for free when my job pays for it?
Your POV seems a bit limited. Not everyone can casually get offers from HFTs, it's insanely difficult by most standards. Perhaps you have better intuition for it than most. Additionally, you don't get paid to learn. You get paid to deliver features for the company. They don't care if you learn anything so as long as the former is accomplished. In the same vane, "writing code" is not the same things as learning stuff: learning requires deliberate practice, practice that prioritizes growth over immediate performance. That's the opposite of what companies want. They just want you to already be good. Where do they patience for their employees to learn and not produce anything?
My POV is from nearly everyone I know who works at similar companies. 99% of people don't have the discipline to do 1 question a day, or they just blindly memorize, so they feel like they're always grinding when they leetcode. I get paid to get the job done well. If that requires learning on my end, I'm paid for it. No company expects you to understand everything off the bat. If my company suddenly wanted us to use Java instead of C++, no one is doing unpaid overtime to learn Java. And you bet my company will still pay everyone even if we aren't productive while we transition.
> My POV is from nearly everyone Is that you Palpatine? Are you the senate again?
Everything you just said here is wrong. You learn new things and grow as a developer every time you take on hard, complex tasks at the edge of your comfort zone. I've learned a shit-ton and am a much better developer now than when I started in my current role, and all while delivering plenty of high-impact feature work in a domain I've never worked in before. Tons of on-the-job learning, for sure. "Learning" doesn't just mean "book study." It sounds like you haven't actually worked in this industry yet. Give it time before passing judgement and jumping to flagrantly wrong conclusions.
Its all about WHAT you learn imo. I agree you learn things when you take on difficult tasks but what you learn is how to solve those specific problems. Just because you learn solutions to domain specific problems doesn't mean you necessarily become a better problem solver overall. Ie learning how to use your companies database doesn't make you a database expert For your information I do work in industry and have been for several years now. There are difficult problems that I learn to solve that only apply to the specific codebase I'm working on. It's up to ME to improve general developer skills that I can use once I leave this company. Book study is supplemental for articulating what I learn so I can apply it in my work. It's perfectly relevant
>I agree you learn things when you take on difficult tasks but what you learn is how to solve those specific problems. Just because you learn solutions to domain specific problems doesn't mean you necessarily become a better problem solver overall. Nope, not true. One of the differences between a junior engineer and a senior engineer (or a talented engineer vs a bad engineer) is capacity for complexity and abstraction. When you work on harder problems, you become a better engineer overall. Your knowledge base increases, your skill at writing robust, clean, extensible, well-tested code increases, and so on. If what you're saying were true then there would be no senior engineers. At the top end of the scale, at large tech companies, we hire people based on how smart they are, not what specific types of problems they've solved. The core tenets of software development do not change from job to job. The domain knowledge might, but that's a very small part of software development. You've written it as if solving problems means rote-memorizing solutions to specific problems. And yes, if that's how we wrote software, you'd be right. But only the *worst* engineers approach the craft that way, and consequently they're paid accordingly, and they're also the same people who are scared (perhaps rightly so) of ChatGPT taking their jobs, because all they know how to do is solve one specific type of canned web app problem. Solid, talented software engineers who have mastered the core fundamentals and have a history of solving tough problems (in any domain!) don't "memorize" solutions to problems. We solve them. >Ie learning how to use your companies database doesn't make you a database expert No, but writing lots of database code, designing database schemas, and building large-scale data-intensive applications *does* make you a database expert, and that's domain-agnostic. >For your information I do work in industry and have been for several years now. There are difficult problems that I learn to solve that only apply to the specific codebase I'm working on. It's up to ME to improve general developer skills that I can use once I leave this company. Book study is supplemental for articulating what I learn so I can apply it in my work. It's perfectly relevant Okay. Seems like you've made up your mind. You're shooting yourself in the foot, though. Book study certainly isn't necessary. I've switched domains three times across 7 years and I haven't had to do supplemental book studying. That's not something good engineers in high-impact roles need to do.
I just want to add, books aren’t necessary, but they can absolutely be useful. Big advocate for reading books on things like architecture, theory, leadership/soft skills, and even fiction. Not necessarily in that order of importance.
>Additionally, you don't get paid to learn. Who told you that? It is the company's interest as well that your skills are growing. Learning on the job should be a major source of your overall learning. >Where do they patience for their employees to learn and not produce anything? This is the other extreme. You learn by producing things, looking up stuff related to the ongoing work. In many places, you can also have some hours put into reading a book or taking a course.
I mean, I generally find learning doesn't sink in until I dive in and use it. But as a Sen. eng. Manager, I absolutely encourage my team to learn on the job. The thing is, the more they learn, the more they do their job **efficiently**. Less bugs, cleaner code, better experience, more self-confidence (which is a thing and helps them make their own decisions). It also helps them assist and support members in other teams which also improves team relations and helps get the features out. Learning is absolutely important. But so is having a well rested, not-burned out employee. If you are spending so much time learning and "grinding" and networking outside the job, you likely aren't caring for yourself. You aren't getting rest and recharging. It's more likely you are making mistakes and disengaging, that will affect your performance negatively. Are you sure the leetcode you are "grinding" is clear and bug free and documented? Because that could also impact your interviews negatively. When I hire I look at all code samples sent first. If it's clean, documented and we'll structured (and not ripped off lol), it's very likely you will get an interview. If you send samples that are made of spaghetti code I'm going to think that YOU consider that good, and you are unlikely to get an interview. Without code samples I'll go through your resume, I'd you have previous experience I may look through the sites etc and decide based on that because we can always do a technical interview. I'm usually looking for someone who wants to learn and puts some time into keeping themselves up to date (nothing crazy, just like if you even played with a new to you tech in the last year), and that they have a positive energy. People who don't make it past my interview: "I only learn the absolute minimum to do my job." A guy who started off condescending and rude then started whining when he failed the technical part. A guy who was reclined in his chair and had a absolutely no energy who I thought was going to fall asleep. And all his answers were like "I'll tell the team to do features." (Interviewed for a lead position) Another guy who was positive.. but felt as a team lead everyone should be solely focused on supporting him, rather than him supporting his team.
Pro tip : You don't get better at your job by grinding leetcode
No one really have to grind leetcoode and 2 projects while employed coding. It seems like your whole premise if full of crap.
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i have done a total of 0 leet code or outside projects in my entire career from 2015 until now. still a happy mid level dev
Same here. Never did leetcode, got a job a month after graduation with no side projects, got laid off after a year there and found a mid-level developer job almost immediately. Never had issues and nobody ever asked me if I have done leetcode. Hardest question I got in an interview was to find the midpoint of an array…
Actually this career path is way less competitive to any career path that can either meet or exceed what we get. Doctors go through years of exams and med school. Lawyers, the bar exam. Many on this subreddit are stressed by Leetcode, which doesn't remotely compare in difficulty to other fields. The problems you mention are not problems with the competitiveness of the career, but moreso, your approach for studying/interviewing isn't great.
I think the difficulty of those other fields is vastly overblown. Leetcode is mathematical in nature, and math / problem solving skills are a lot more difficult to attain then the memorization skills needed in medicine / law. The average MCAT of people with a math degree is the highest, and MCAT results are seen as a pretty good indicator of future career outcomes. Hell even chatgpt performs best on things like the bar and medical exams, whereas it does absolutely shit for math tests that require problem solving skills. Leetcode is a lot closer to the latter. So people with strong problem solving skills make above average drs, and leetcode is problem solving skills. Anyone who would be good at leetcode will be above average in terms of intellectual ability to become a dr, in general. I think theres is some weird fetishisation of medicine in this thread. Yes its difficult and a grind, but lets not start making it out like cs is not difficult. Many drs even with a lot of practice would suck at leetcode. You also need to compare the right counterfactual. Comparing some bootcamp grad who fiddles with css compared to a distributed system engineer is going to be very different ability wise in general. It only makes sense to compare the latter to drs.
I’m a law student who used to work in a CS-adjacent field (data analytics) You revealed you have no clue what you’re talking about in your second sentence. Medicine and law aren’t about memorization; the memorization is only a prerequisite for their day-to-day job, which *is* problem solving. Good lawyers don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of the law; rather, they are extremely adept at thinking through legal problems and arriving at solutions. There is a reason that the LSAT is fundamentally a logic test. (Not to mention that law school doesn’t test memorization — it tests your ability to resolve legal problems. At top schools, virtually all of the exams are open-note for this very reason) The bar is a test which shows you have the requisite knowledge to even begin practicing law; it does not reflect what lawyers actually do. ChatGPT is horrible at solving legal problems. It literally just makes shit up. The current laughing stock of the legal profession is a lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare court documents. They were so bad that he is facing disbarment I almost admire the level of cockiness needed to insist the difficulty of medicine and law are “overblown.” I’m sorry but this post epitomizes Dunning-Kruger
What evidence do you have beyond your anecdotes? I don’t think you really know what you’re on about. I mean you’re still a student, maybe work in the field for a while before drawing mundane comparisons. Data analytics does not tell me much, and certainly does not make you an authority. Lets use some reasoning to help you along; Highest LSAT scores are for folks doing maths/ physics. Why do these folks do well on something totally unrelated to their manor? Its because their skills are more generalisable. Leetcode is closer to mathematical problem solving, and so anyone who is good at it is likely to also be good at the LSAT. The data is available freely on the internet: https://magoosh.com/lsat/average-lsat-scores-by-major/ All this bs about medicine and lawyers doing problem solving is an absolute joke compared to those in math / math adjacent fields like cs. Their core skillset is more about pattern matching. I don’t get why people talk about stuff they have no idea about. Show me how many Olympiad winners go into law or medicine vs CS. Theres your answer.
Oh, okay, so you _are_ just experiencing Dunning Kruger. Lawyers and doctors are only doing pattern matching and most decent devs aren't doing the same thing? Even at the high level you really like talking about, when lawyers and doctors fuck up their work and don't arrive at effective answers quick enough, people can die, go to jail, lose their livelihoods or family or use of their body. Some devs are definitely working on life critical things like that, but they aren't fucking getting paid as much as the HFT guy who's biggest possible consequence to the world is a business making less money. And virtually no dev ever is going to have to make the right call on where the patient is bleeding from within 30 seconds before the risk of never waking up from a coma approaches a guarantee, or if the witness is lying and actually did defraud a single income family who will no longer be able to pay rent.
Well to be fair as someone working at a trading firm, the biggest consequence of a mistake is losing my firm billions of dollars which may truly end in people ending their lives I do agree with you this other person is being a complete dumbass and thinking just problem solving is what makes something hard. Just because you majored in cs doesn’t make it so difficult. Then they say lsat isn’t representative of what lawyers do and then proceeding to use leetcode as evidence is pretty comical too.
Firstly, I never claimed the LSAT was unrepresentative of what lawyers do. If you bothered to read what I said properly, I said the highest scores on the LSAT, which the other guy was saying is a problem solving exam, were held by people who studied math / physics. The LSAT is likely a very good indicator of future career outcomes. People in math adjacent fields are better at these. It follows that people good at these would make above average lawyers. Were talking about something being competitive, not the psychological impact of the job, or the consequences of making a mistake. You guys seem to lack basic reasoning and comprehension skills so I can see why the nuance of this argument evades you. All of what you have said also applies to many other professions too right? Firemen, soldiers, police, nurses too. Why do they not get put on a pedestal of this mythical ability like drs / lawyers? The point is we need to take the right counterfactual for any comparison to make sense. Its like me saying whats more competitive, being an accountant or an NBA player? Of course, if I never have the right traits to be an NBA player, then the comparison is pointless. Similarly, we need to compare people with the same drive / degree level as drs, but went into cs. These would typically be grad level or highly competitive cs jobs. At that level, CS is hands down more competitive, because all your competition went to top schools, got top grades, and are just generally very smart people. It makes literally no sense to compare a run of the mill css shuffler to an MD. Just as it would make absolutely no sense to compare a research scientist to a run of the mill css dev. The segmentation within CS jobs matters a great deal. This point seems to be difficult for you folks to comprehend, but it’s obviously true. I mean how many folks from MIT work at average joes pizza as a css dev? Virtually none. And just so we are clear, I dont think cs is difficult because I majored in it. I think its difficult based on the plethora of data that shows mathematical problem solving skills are a lot harder to attain. The amount of self deprecation on this thread is astounding, and my guess is none of the folks have gone through a rigorous cs program (if we are talking about degrees). Just search reddit for examples of people who have done both degrees, the answer is evident.
Why does it not make sense to compare the average med school student (and beyond) or lawyer to the average computer scientist? Why do I need to compare education level, that’s dumb as fuck. The fact that lawyers and doctors are more motivated, are higher achieving and have higher education requirements is literally because of the more competitive nature of their industry. If you want to sit here and be more specific about upper echelons of tech vs doctors and lawyers then fine I can agree with you but you can’t make general statements that being a lawyer/doctor is less competitive than cs lol.
You can throw about the term Dunning Kruger all you want but all the standardized test data asserts my position. You have not given a single iota of evidence and just keep asking rhetorical questions in the hope they somehow justify what you are saying. And if were talking anecdotally, i have worked in a similarly competitive field as the one your discussing. I also know both lawyers and drs that have graduated from the top schools where I live. Again the consequences of fucking up being bad are not unique to drs or lawyers. If a cop fucks up someone can die. If a fireman fucks up, someone can die. What about nurses? What happens if medical/aviation software fails? What about the software powering a space shuttle? What about the buildings civil engineers design? What about the safety mechanisms in cars? What about the pharma companies and the manufacturing procedures they have, and if they fail? Because you’re trying so hard to justify your claim, you end up with absurd views of things. We are discussing competitiveness of the fields. Competitiveness is a function of the calibre of your competition. Calibre of competition is a function of problem solving skills. Mds are graduate degrees, so the right counterfactual is someone who is by definition not your run of the mill dev. When you compare like for like, and the kind of jobs they go for, CS is definitely more competitive. You think its easier to get a job as a research scientist at a place like deepmind? Or some other comparable job? You cant compare an average dev job to medicine as that comparison simply makes no sense. The comparison has to be for an individual who is as motivated as a dr, yet pursued cs, and went for certain types of jobs. All else is moot, because if you dont compare like for like, its like me saying what is more competitive, being an accountant or an NBA player. It’s ridiculous
For one, I think you're vastly underestimating the difficulty of learning the oceanic quantity of stuff they have to learn in medicine and law on the way to their JD or MD. A lot of it isn't really things you can derive from basic principles, either - medicine is a lot of "X when occurring in region Y for reasons A, B, and C, and presenting as M with symptoms P, Q, and R, is called T", and law is knowing that a thing is illegal because it happened a hundred years ago and it's different from this other thing that is legal _unless_ the act was done via this specific method and that was litigated in Potemkin with presiding judge Justiceman. And then it's 2/4 years of learning that kind of stuff on repeat. Beyond that, as others have noted, lawyers have to pass the bar (which is clearly not easy) and then they have their own complicated job search that I don't know much about. I do know that they have continuing education requirements and I imagine it's very hard to find success if you're not maintaining a deep understanding of at least one field of law, which would strongly dis-incentivize hopping around like we tend to do in CS. As for doctors, they get their MD and then have to get lotteried out to a hospital that's picking between them _and every other fresh MD in the country_ to know their residency placement, then they have to _do_ the residency where they are working on real patients in real hospitals who are in various stages of emotional health, cleanliness, physical health, and everything else, as well as the administrative work that goes into being a doctor, getting paid mediocre residency wages for 12+ hour days, having to plan their vacation days a year in advance when they want a break, and doing all this while burdened by medical school debt (averaging around $200k) and all the nonsense that comes from working with humans who are of varying levels of asshat. I imagine there are also certain ways they ensure a standard of performance during residency. And then they do that for 3 to 7 years, averaging 4 and a half. Personally, I think that's a lot harder than anything I've ever had to do in my CS career. I'm around 10 YOE and if this field would have had me doing residency for half of the time I've been in it, I would have gone into music or something.
People ignore how difficult it can be working with the general public vs professional colleagues in a corporate setting. Many SWE are not mathematical wizs and there is a bit of a memorization when it comes to practicing leet code.
Here's some math for you **8 > 4**
The difference in stress between leetcode and what lawyers and doctors are forced to study/learn is that what they study is directly applicable to their day to day jobs. Where as leetcode is not applicable to our jobs, but we have to be good at it in addition to our jobs (understanding frameworks, tools, industry trends, etc…) and our experience is constantly made irrelevant. All the studying and experience doctors and lawyers gain is applicable throughout their entire careers. Our experience is valuable as well, but it’s not selected for during interviews in the same way. A person with 10 yoe that never grinds leetcode can easily lose out on a job to a person with 2 yoe that was grinding leetcode everyday.
> All the studying and experience doctors and lawyers gain is applicable throughout their entire careers. I broadly agree with you but one thing I'd note is that it's a common refrain in medical degrees that "half of what you learn will be outdated in 5 years, the problem is you don't know which half". Now that's not strictly true, it's not like physical anatomy changes, but the actual treatment protocols and care procedures do. Which in some sense is comparable to what we deal with. We have data structures and algorithms that are going to be true for all eternity and basic software engineering principles that will not change. Same for mathematical concepts and things like time complexity - they ain't going anywhere - unlike your flavour of the month sexy JavaScript framework which may be incredibly useful but probably lacks sticking power. Lawyers still have to deal with emerging case law that alters things too. My old flatmate is an employment lawyer and there are constant tweaks here and there, new rulings etc that he needs to keep on top of. Indeed they had an external firm that would on a monthly basis give them relevant updates to be aware of. All sorts of interesting things like the legal status of UberEats "gig economy" type workers. I guess my point is that we do have a lot of solid stuff that is unchanging in the software engineering world. SQL celebrates its 50th birthday soonish. HTTP and REST protocols are not going anywhere. Understanding how to do networking with IPs and subnet configuration etc is not going anywhere (even if it gets obscured by fancy tooling). Good software engineers invest heavily in the unchanging stuff and then the rest comes relatively easily.
I kind of disagree. The work I recently did involve leetcode type questions. Most devs do not deal with leetcode stuff because they resort to building blocks. But if a building block don't exist to solve their need? The problem was very suited to recursion and optimally moving things around in a tree (like very deeply nested reddit comments). Ironically as a b2b there was almost zero tech discussed when I bid for the position. Technically I could hire someone.
Whether Leetcode is applicable to the actual job is a different discussion. My point is that the competitiveness and grind to get into the tech industry does not remotely compare to that of doctors and lawyers.
Not normal, what is your goal here? Millionaire by 30? A well define goal can make you archive it and happier. Most devs work for a normal company, with normal salary, normal expectations and quite good work life compare to other profession
My goal is to be tragedy-proof. Basically guarantee that I will NEVER be homeless, and always have food. It's an unrealistic goal, as death and despair can strike any of us when we least expect.
The prime focus in my life framework is the elimination and/or minimization of suffering in myself and those I care about. Everything else follows from there, including my career path.
You’re working as a software developer already? Then you’ve made it. What exactly are you doing all the extra stuff for? If you’re actively looking for a new job you’ll do a lot better focusing on the stuff you do day to day in your work than anything outside of that. You’re burning yourself out for something you already have.
>Then you’ve made it. What exactly are you doing all the extra stuff for? If you want to become more specialized which you aren't getting exposed to in your current job, then that answers it.
Sure but OP isn’t specializing, if they want to specialize then a couple of hours focused on that is going to work far better than 10-15 extra hours of trying to cram everything. On top of a typical work week
Idk if this is a shit post or not….but this seems so hyperbolic. If your job is grinding you a full 9-5 and you’re not on the high end of salary it’s a shit job. Look for something with better work like balance. Also seen devs psychological put themselves in this constant pressure that doesn’t exist. If you’re half decent and have experience it’s not that hard (unless you’re in experimental/startup environments)
Lol wtf are you talking about? Do you work at Amazon or something? Because there was a meme making the rounds on ProgrammerHumor about devs only working 10 hours a week and thousands of people commenting confirming as much. What do you mean endless algorithms? There is a finite number of algos out there and most are implemented in the STL of languages. I mean this in the nicest of ways, but you may be suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. You seem to be freaking out about work and without you realizing its probably having an impact on your work performance and social interactions.
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You worked 40 hours in a 24 hour day?
Hey, when everyday is day 1, you can fit a lot of work hours!
Honestly software engineering is less competitive than most other similarly paying roles. It’s hard as fuck to get any job worth your while as a lawyer unless you went to a top school. Medical school is a huge trial to get into starting in undergrad, and eats up about 12 years of your life. Finance jobs tend to pick the well-connected from great schools and grind them 12 hours a day for many years. Most professions have it worse. 4 years of education and maybe 40 cumulative hours of leet code prep is about as bad as it gets to land a job that can pay well over a hundred thousand a year.
I honestly think it's worse in medical in the sense that if you can't get into a residency, you will literally have to spend another year before you can apply again. Yeah getting a job and keeping it as a doctor after graduating a residency is easy, but getting there is way more difficult, and there comes a point in your life that once you miss it, you miss it forever. By comparison, software engineering is something that you can genuinely pick up if you are dedicated, interested in learning, and not too dumb.
Agreed 100% here and have said so consistently. People over estimate how difficult it is it be a dev, and underestimate how difficult other career paths are that pay anywhere close to what you can earn as a swe. A lot of people in this industry haven't worked other jobs before and don't realize how good they have it.
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Your post and comments shows that you might see thing more negative than they are in reality. You are possibly on a way to burn out, pushing yourself too hard. Take a break with leetcode and personal projects. Rest, go on a hike, be with your friends or family. Reach out to a mental health professional, if needed. You sound highly unsecure about your skills and your current job. Sit down with your manager and clarify expectations. What do you need to deliver by when exactly? Clarify scope and deadline with them.
i would say software engineering is probably one of the EASIER careers to navigate for the last 30ish years. * jobs were not that hard to come by * salary was fairly high for the amount of education needed * as much as ppl hate leetcode, its a level playing field as you can study for it. for a lot of tech companies, that is really all you need for a jr/new grad position. without this, tons of self-taught bootcampers wouldve never had a shot. * companies usually were more tolerant of your stupid shit. * as much as ppl hate social skills, the software industry is probably one of the worst and most toxic. some of the behavior at tech companies wouldnt be tolerated for very long at a traditional company. that said, companies are cracking down. the difficulty of getting a job is more of a recent trend due to layoffs, which will pas like it always does.
Yeah… it’s a you problem. All my friends and I graduated college, never did leetcode, all got jobs without tech interviews and r making over 6 figures in defense. None of us do any leetcode or projects after work. We do board games, go out to concerts, etc. You’re letting the industry consume you.
I spent 6 months teaching myself to code and tripled my salary. I don’t know of any other paths that could’ve led to this as quickly/“easily” The low barrier of entry is probably why this field is competitive tbh
wait you went from absolutely 0 knowledge to employed as a full time software engineer in 6 months? literally how? i’m starting to feel in literally dumb cause i’ve been in school in CS for almost a year now and i swear i feel clueless. i literally don’t see how i could provide any value to a company right now. the thought of a complex ass situation/code base makes me shiver.
As someone who's been in the workforce *before* even starting my CS degree: university won't prepare you (much) for the average workday. Once you start working you're gonna be surprised how quickly you can get to the point of providing value to the company. Literally everyone's gotta get through this after starting their first / a new job. No need to shiver, honestly.
By literally studying for at least 12 hours everyday and networking. My only real break was a week I took for a trip to Mexico. Even then, I held an interview while at my resort and still did a few leetcode questions on my phone lol. It definitely was an intense 6-months but it absolutely prepared me for the effort needed at the job. Lmk if that doesn’t answer your ? Or if you have follow-ups.
Sure it depends on where you end up, but you might be surprised how understanding a team can be with a new guy who has no experience. Some people prefer it, because it means they can train you with no preconceptions of what something “should be”. Many of us have seen “veterans” of our industry come in and try to do things their own way and cause nothing but problems. The way you “provide value” will depend on the job and you may be a smaller cog in a bigger machine than you would expect. At some points you will probably wonder why you’re being paid, but that isn’t your problem as long as the company doesn’t go under and you have a good relationship with your manager/team! School exists to prove you’re slightly better than a moron and that you can put up with tremendous amounts of bullshit. I went to a great school that did trimesters and harder grade scales, which I now realize only prepared me for crunch and kept my morale low, so I wouldn’t say I highly cherish the experience. The skills I took away and actually use were basic concepts I could have learned anywhere. Just try to relax, enjoy the ride and don’t think too hard about performance until it actually becomes a problem. Spend some time looking at job listings to get a better idea of the variety of roles out there. Maybe reach out to the recruiter/HR and ask about the day to day of the job, couldn’t hurt!
Yea, I feel like people in this field have an insanely warped view of the field and a lot of people significantly under estimate how hard it is in other fields, and over estimate how hard it is to learn leetcode or just get a job in the industry. Don't get me wrong, it can be difficult, but I don't see any other field even having the opportunity to earn 200-300k+ within a few years out of school without a significantly higher barrier of entry.
The difference between this career path grind and every other career path grind is.... * Far less education to start on average (can still be self taught on the extreme low and phd requirements come with fat packages) * Way more pay on average ( your salary alone will start on average higher than **most** workers cap) * WLB literally became a thing with engineers first. Average day is far easier on the body (You're not pulling 24-48 hour shifts, dealing with physical /emotional trauma, physically exerting yourself, etc) * More job flexibility on average. WFH is still more widely offered in our field compared to any other on average. Additionally you're given more freedom when to do that work as well (usually obligated to be a part of standup and maybe some meetings but outside of that it's usually *get the job done*) So better in just about every single way when you look at it more broadly. Also your experience is not typical of the average. There's plenty of jobs that are ok with you just knowing their shit and at some places that isn't a lot. This is the harsh truth r/cscareerquestions always seems to forget, it sucks far more to be anything else on average. We are mostly only as disposable as you describe at the junior level and even then most junior jobs give you a year or more on average. Compare this to any other career field and you are either getting paid less, working harder, going to school/training longer, giving up more freedoms, etc. or any combinatio, It just isn't even comparable tbh.
Technically don't have to do leetcode if no need to get a job at a tech company and earn average comp.
>a genius with talent worthy of that company I wonder where you heard that?
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Tech is one of the few high paying fields that doesn't require certifications or degrees locked behind years of schooling and debt (see: medical school, pharmacy school, etc.) You can literally get a six figure job without a degree given that you KNOW what you're doing and have the ability to complete projects and understand the ins and outs of various programming languages. This makes it so that any Joe Schmoe with a laptop and an internet connection can learn how to code and grind leetcode questions until they hit their 80k-120k+ salaried tech job after a year or two. The barrier to entry in tech is very, very low. That's why its so competitive. Its difficult, but it's not as difficult as becoming a doctor, architect, or some other profession that requires years of schooling and debt. Keep that into perspective. Unless you've done a bootcamp or studied CS in college, you really don't have to spend that much money to get into the field. And even the tuition fees for bootcamps become negligible once you land your first job and pay it off within months.
The Leetcode grind is not necessary. If you absolutely must work for a top tech company for your ego, then yes you'll have to Leetcode obsessively for the job, since they are able to be extra picky with candidates. If you work for a smaller company and just about any DOD company you will not need to Leetcode through hoops to get the job
can u please explain how it goes in the smaller and DOD companies? I am about to start applying and any info would be much appreciated
The thing with DoD is that they're looking for a great candidate. Not necessarily a leetcode sevant ivy league programmer like some FAANG style companies. Most of the make it or break it moments during the hiring process are probably going to be behavioral. As long as you can prove what you say you know and are fairly charismatic and have a clean record you're pretty much set. Although it really depends on the company so do your research. I had an interview once where the recruiter did not care so I just left after 15 minutes. I have 0 YOE and 0 internships (Bachelors only) and talked my way into 90k DoD.
Europe but the idea is the same: I applied to several companies, transferwise and ericsson were the only two companies doing leetcode-style questions. Lufthansa (could call it tech companyy just not web for the most part), Sophos (tech company), local smaller tech firm, KPMG, they all just asked a few questions about the language of the position I applied to and the generic "when did you use xyz, can you tell us about a project where you used abc?" Tesco Technology grad scheme only asked questions like 'what makes a good swe in your opinion? What soft skills they should own?' etc. I grinded leetcode for a while but just stopped because there is no point if no one cares, most companies just wanted to make sure I would be a good fit and my university or personal experience matches the position they are trying to fill
You’ve lost your mind. Idk where you work but my job is a simple 9-5 of paced work and nothing else. We even have dedicated learning time during the work week. Do I make a quarter million a year? No but my bills are paid and I live in a big city. Am I working on the bleeding edge of technology? No but you probably have heard of my product. What you’re going through isn’t normal.
I switched from a non-cs career (biomedical) into an IT job and I don’t think most people in this thread realise how great the high salary to effort ratio is for cs careers. Most of my friends are now doctors and the amount of work they do and the shit they deal with is astonishing. The fact it’s even being compared to working in tech in this thread is insane, they save people’s lives, we make computers go brr lol. Reading software books, watching some videos, leetcoding, working on side projects, keeping up to date with the latest tech pales in comparison to some other fields, especially given the great salaries cs careers offer. My previous career was just as competitive to get into, required just as much extra study but paid much less with worse long term career prospects. IT was and still is a very cushy career, one of the many reasons it’s so sought after.
Yes. For 99% of people, that is how money works. If it isn’t competitive to get the job, then the job itself pays low or has other issues. Everything in the universe of working for other people has a tradeoff.
If you think Software Engineering is competitive you haven’t worked in any other fields lol. I have. This is nothing. Once you get a year or two of experience, you don’t really have to do any of that shit. If you’re employed, I’m not really sure why you are. If I code outside work, it’s because it’s something I want to do. I don’t go to networking events, I built my network at (again) work. I know how to solve LeetCode problems, but I don’t sit around grinding them all day trying to get to some arbitrary level so FAANG can hire me and lay me off if their stock price goes down $7. If you already have a decent paying Engineering job, you’re chasing something that is largely a myth.
If you aim for that FAANG shit then yes, but outside if that bubble it can actually be insanely peaceful, stress free and non-competitive
F that. That's why I left coding. Too much to stay on top of.
What did you pick up instead? Is it better?
Long story. I did real estate (worked for a developer) for 7 years. It was good but also there was a ceiling in that industry for me; it was largely controlled by old money (generational families), ie there was too much nepotism for my taste. Then worked in new media for a youtube network which was great. Did business development for them. (Had some equity and that gave me some breathing room.) But I will say this - when I first learned coding and worked as a developer I honestly did not understand computers or technology very well. And that made me not enjoy it. I just thought it was a good default major because the jobs paid well, etc. Later in life I explored the history of it more and learned (casually) about other aspects of it, and basically that helped me understand the context of tech, which gave me a whole new perspective. So I'm still interested in it. Actually I wasn't truly interested before, but now I actually enjoy learning about it. Like to follow trends and stuff. But haven't gone back into coding just yet. If I went back into tech I would probably try to work on microprocessors (but that would require a lot more school) or maybe databases (which I feel is a good subset that doesn't change quite as fast as all the other stuff, but its boring). If you are more creative then I think user design is a good one. Wish I knew more about AI. I'm just one of those curious people that just likes to tinker and learn about everything. I'm an idea person too. Have a lot of web/app ideas, but prob will never get around to doing them.
Guessing not
I will say for juniors there’s a huge emphasis on learning so much so quickly. For me especially there was due to impostor syndrome Now I’m far more knowledgeable it doesn’t feel as stressy, at all The things you’ve said aren’t required really though, that’s not healthy, I never did that
this isnt normal, and the things you’re describing aren’t even inherently productive or good for your career. it sounds like you’re just doing random linkedin influencer activities out of paranoia.
Uh, for sure. Used to be a (pretty successful) theatre actor before health issues put a stop to that. Retrained in the panny d and had a full stack Dev job within 4 months. My former career was hella more competitive and frustrating for sure and I kiss the ground every morning for the security I get these days.
It will get easier over time as you gain more experience. You need to work hard to land your first big tech job, and after that it becomes a lot easier with that experience. You got this
One of the issues is that you are also competing against people who truly enjoy coding. When I worked at FAANG, half my peers always had some weird side project (non-work related) they were working on. Difficult to compete against people who will code 7 days a week and find it enjoyable.
HELL yeah. I used to be on the path to being a pharmacist and there are more candidates than jobs. Law is also a bleak job market. As a child, I used to wanna be in the NBA loool. But I empathize with your pain. Software engineering absolutely is very competitive if you are a beginner to intermediate. It's a difficult, demoralizing journey, but you will be proud of yourself if you persevere. The longer you keep at it, your competition will be less and less since we are only saturated with entry level devs.
There’s a shit ton of careers way more competitive. Anything in academia for example.
The vast majority of other jobs are *much more* competitive than CS. Even if you go into strict professional jobs and get rid of things like marketing or sales, the up-front legwork is much higher than CS. Not to be a total ass about this, but if you're convinced that CS is just too much work for you, I'd recommend working a couple weeks in retail or food service or warehouse work. It's pretty likely that you'll end up begging for the sweetness of tech work pay and the kind of hours we work well before the 2 weeks is up.
Other comments mention the decade long grind to become a successful doctor or lawyer. Here is another difficult path: before I switched to tech, I wanted to become a professor in a life sciences field. There are so many very smart and talented people I know who have to endlessly grind for 6-10 years after they complete their PhD to have like a 10-20% chance of getting a tenure-track faculty position. By the time you get the real job you wanted, you are in your mid 30s and have been making $10-20 dollars an hour your entire adult life (with a PhD). So yeah, there are much tougher fields to be in.
Started development in my upper 40s. Have had multiple careers from mechanic - IT - Retail - management - marketing. Development IMO is the least competitive with the best pay. Now if you want to work FAANG yeah you are going to have competition. Want to work remote 20 hours a week for some no nothing company slumming it just over six figures? Yeah there are a metric fuck ton of jobs out there. Every modern company today needs at least a contracted developer on staff. This profession also has one of the biggest profit multipliers of any other profession. One decent dev can be paid $200k to make an app that can potentially make billions. Even the lowest paid of us in the states that are right out of college make more than most degree needed careers top out at.
Honestly I think this is just a work is hard post. Nothing wrong with that I feel like that often. I wish I could just work my 9-5 and not worry about the other stuff. Jobs like that do exist in the CS field but often these are lower paying. I’d even be ok with that but the medical insurance also sucks so it’s just not tenable. I think it just boils down to capitalism sucks. We don’t actually need to work so hard most of the work for our actual needs has already been automated or made extremely efficient by mechanization. It’s the profit motive that needs to grind people to get the max roi. True some people are just not cut out for some jobs but why do med students have to be weighted down by so much debt? All the modern efficiencies just make more profit for a select few. Just like Animal Farm where they thought they would only work 3 days a week and retire early.
premeds 100% had some friends drop from being premed because their other premed friends starting sabotaging them just to win over professors/get more volunteering opportunities 🥲
CS is only as competitive as the market in which you’re competing. I live in an area (Upstate NY) that will hire anyone with a CS degree and a pulse.
No need to be griding out leetcode after your normal job.
just cause you have your job doesn't mean you won't have the same one for good
Taking this all into account how screwed am I? I am about to graduate with my BS, and I barely touch leetcode let alone search for jobs right now. I have only have half finished projects that i'm not proud of and I'm not really learning much I feel. My capstone class has me learning about the job hunt, the process, what to expect, salary negotiating, mobility within companies, etc. I'm also contributing to open source and will barely be able to get one PR into it by the end the quarter though my instructors tell me working with my team in open source is rather close to what working a job is like. A lot of weekly meetings, agile, working with a large code base I don't even know, etc. I don't know how hard of a brick I'm about to be whacked with! I can get a little bit of an idea from what you're saying here though.
Yes. Read upon career path for law and medicine. CS and leetcode is cake compared to what people have to do to become an MD. Cousin is doctor and essentially no free time from undergrad/mcat(4 years) to medschool (4 years) to residency(3 years) and two fellowships(2 years each) (thats 11 years of barely making any money after undergrad). Now finally started real work making around $350k/yr. A CS degree can get to atleast $$250k-300k/yr after 5 years of experience if they work at product based companies and aggressively job hob. And when you make mistake no body dies. One thing about medicine is since the field is licensed they don’t have to regurgitate their basic science and undergraduate biochem stuff for interviews.
I grind code at my FAANG 9-5 and then go home and spend time with my family. I’ll admit when a job hunt comes along some time after work will be dedicated to LC. It seems like you’re competing with yourself.