this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Same: so many people signed up because they heard IT payed well and has many offers. Half the class dropped after the first year when they realize it's not for them.
I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.
Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.
If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What's more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you're doing.
Which is hardly trivial to create. CS is a vast field, with a lot of subsectors and areas of specialization, and not all of the relevant skills are tied to things you can toss in a resume or portfolio. A lot of companies need people who have 1) good communications skills and 2) the ability to identify problems in code or infrastructure and offer efficiently implemented solutions, or at least the path to those solutions and 3) knowledge of multiple coding languages and a certain degree of specialization in Linux. Some of these are difficult things to present in a CV and the place they really can be demonstrated is in interviews. The hard part for a new graduate is just going to be able to talk to someone who can give them the job and see if they're a good fit for the company. Internships or co-op opportunities are also very important, as they let you talk about work you've actually done somewhere. But these are hard to come by.
I'm talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won't even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you've been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn't get in school.
Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you'll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.