I had terrible imposter syndrome when I landed a sw dev job. I thought everyone could tell that I didn’t belong. I was / am self-taught. Everyone had CS degrees. I thought I was a fraud. I later recalibrated to realize that I’d earned it even harder without a degree. But I had to get that spot to be able to leverage my knowledge. There are probably people who know a lot more than me getting rejected because they don’t have the right credentials.
I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role
Of course that’s probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn’t get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It’s taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it’s not reeeeally working lol
25 years after graduation in CS I’m still waiting for the Pumping Lemma to have any relevance to my work as a dev.
Get a job in scientific computing then
Even stuff like simulation engines can make a grown man cry
I’m glad I don’t have to cry. I was just terrified initially that to do this kind of work you had to be really good at maths and stuff, but actually you’re just taking user input and putting it in a database, then getting it out later to show back to the user, fluffing stakeholders, and often rewriting the code you already did in a new framework or architecture that looks good on your resume.
Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I’m still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don’t know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome
CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don’t matter too much. Like, I don’t think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would’ve been more useful.
The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a “real” company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master’s degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.
It’s because computer science degrees aren’t really programming degrees.
A computer science degree sets you up to be a scientist, most common dev jobs are just glorified Lego sets patching libraries together and constructing queries. There is skill, knowledge, and effort in those jobs, but they are fundamentally different.
Most common software dev jobs are closer to the end user than not.
