At what age were you actually capable of writing good pieces of software?
I am 22, soon to be bsc in cs, but i still think i am nowhere near the levels of other IT dudes in terms of software eng. skills.
I don't even think I am even capable of contributing to open source in any meaningful way. and to think that others at my age (e.g linus, ios/android jailbreak scene devs, etc.) were able to do so much more, i.e. writing a fucking os kernel, finding and exploting vulnerabilites in modern day os's, makes me kinda angry at myself for not being as skilled.
how long will it take me to get on that level, and more importantly, is it even possible for an average joes cs student to get there? i think there are so many people who are so fucking smart and knowledgable in the CS field, i cannot imagine counting myself to one of the best anytime in the next 30 years, if ever.
You're 22 man, you're practically a baby. While it's fine having that drive and that sense of urgency its no use crippling yourself with arbitrary deadlines. Just keep working on it and eventually you'll get there
Ethan James
>IT dudes in terms of software eng. skills. you mean writing fizzbuzz in python and saying you're a 1337 programmer who totally deserves as much respect and money as people with a masters in CS? And then crying because the company "totally needs you" because you're the only one who knows how to plug cables into a switch on a diagram given to you by the architect.
Brody Powell
26
Asher Sanchez
Don't worry about it OP Looking at the IT fanatics on the internet, you will feel like it's normal to have that much experience at a younger age But when you enter a company, you'll find engineers struggling with the easiest concepts while having years of experience.
t. 23 yr old automation engineer (Electrical eng.)
Caleb Myers
Are you sure?
Tyler Flores
After 10 years of professional experience (while pushing myself and learning all the time, unlike my coworkers)
Joseph Johnson
there are ppl who never get better at their job. if you struggle right now you'll most likely struggle later in your career. if that's the case pls leave this profession and don't become a manager.
Nicholas Cox
I don't think failed techies becoming managers is a problem, at least they still understand the basics of what they're managing and know that it can be difficult. And usually they've realized they suck at it so they move into a position where they might not suck but they're still able to help out with the thing they liked.
don't compare yourself to those outliers. that's like an athlete or musician comparing themselves to the big stars. you don't have to be as good as them in order to have a great career/life.
Nathan King
>pls leave this profession oh stfu you little faggot.
Logan Morgan
>an athlete or musician well to be fair, an athlete or musician who isn't top class is just a school teacher.
Jace Russell
Big deal. I'm 30 and still working on single-file C programs from textbooks, don't see why by 35 I won't be contributing to open-source projects, then I have another 30 YEARS at least to keep learning. You can be in a much better position at my age if you stop comparing yourself to Linus and just keep grinding.
Also, I have 5 years in a STEM job and trust me, people leave college with ZERO abilities and get graduate jobs. Only the ones who apply themselves and keep learning after college get anywhere. So be that guy you CUNT.
Angel Stewart
truth hurts. kys
Asher Morris
>falling for the CS meme Should have done an engineering degree. I bet the EE students at your campus can write better software than half you fags.
Elijah Howard
EE who went IT here, 30 y/o with 5 years sysadmin experience. I work with SQL devs with 20+ years of experience, they wreck me when it comes to relational stuff but I've built my own dynamic tsql shit to check the status of a Powershell ETL tool i built that confuses them.
It's not about how long you've been doing something, it's about how much you've done and how deep you've gotten. Just keep doing projects that force you to learn and you'll inherently wind up an authority on X, Y and Z as you progress.
Nolan Adams
If you haven't yet, do a co-op or internship, preferably several short ones at different places. It will open your eyes to some realities mainly that it's not as bad as you think. Contributing to a foss project could be tricky, you have to communicate with the people, learn their architecture and coding style, then start out with smaller bugs while maintaining communication. This is made more difficult if you're trying to work with a project whose language you're not familiar with. About understanding complex topics, most of the time it just comes down to amount of effort put into learning it. You have to find resources, you have to formulate an understanding of the theoretical concepts, then you have to apply them to a problem you face. Making a simple project and understanding the underlying concepts goes a long way. For example a simple Ray Tracer, Audio Spectrum Analyzer, or Steganography project would be neat to practice on. Skill acquisition is in itself a skill that can be improved. Analyze, adapt, overcome. 22 is super young as says, take your time moving forward, just make sure that you DO move forward. Also >finding vulnerabilities requires skill kek, it's literally learning about basic interfaces and brute forcing with a series of scripts until you find a hole, or wetware hacks. nothing complicated, just time consuming. Always about the direction and amount of effort put in
most people don't know what software engineering even is, i use IT now because this one time i spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to a guy what software engineering meant. people are comfortable with IT, so it's a nice encapsulating term for anything to do with computers. hopefully this changes soon
better embedded? maybe, depends on how earnest the student was and how many internships they did better large scale? no
Xavier Taylor
It took me about 8 years to go from writing my first code to creating useful software other people use. I didn't force it either. It just happened naturally out of my own interests and lack of software out there.
It's really important to have a vision you truly want to create that you're willing to do anything to achieve. I've always wanted to work on robots because I can see how important they're going to be but I dropped out of college and felt like too much of a brainlet to get into it, but I couldn't stand living like that. I started spending 12 hours a day just reading AI research papers and books I didn't understand. Every time I encountered a word or technique I didn't understand I'd go look it up and study it, hammering away at it like an algorithm. Even after studying for a decade I'm even more amazed by the knowledge of researchers. Everyone has their own specialized knowledge and meaningful contributions. I doubt I will ever get my own work published anytime soon but I'm happy to be doing my own research and making progress on things that no one else is working on.
