Did a bachelor into the little brother of CS: information science. Then went on to do a master in computer science. There I had a course that was about "learn anything you want", so I took Paul Hegarty's course on iOS development. That course landed me a job as an iOS dev at the uni for a year. I didn't like the stressful manager, so I got back to my studies again.
I hated my thesis and went to a coding bootcamp to apply as a student. They noticed I could explain things well and understood every slide instantly (thanks to my CS education). They asked me to immediately become an instructor provided I could build a NodeJS app within a month to prove my skills. I've built 4 NodeJS apps within that timeframe [1]. Then I freelanced for a bit.
After graduating I applied to FAANG companies and didn't hear back from any of them and got really disheartened. I always wanted to work at FAANG and they didn't care about my resume or the fact that I completed a master in computer science! That part of my life took 2 years. Don't apply to FAANG when you just finished your CS master and expect them to call back [2]. Now I work at a small company.
If I could do it all over again:
Skip bachelor and master [3]. Why? All I needed was some guidance in the beginning. I knew I wanted to create web apps and websites. Back when I started coding bootcamps weren't a thing, but that's what I needed. What good coding bootcamps allow you to do is teach you how to self-teach yourself whatever you need to learn with computers.
Was university useless? No not at all, but it wasn't efficient with my time. I believe that at least 50% of my time was wasted on stuff I didn't need. The other 50% helped me with learning many tools to understand things very quickly, mostly because I've already seen them before. An example was when I was debugging an issue with EmberJS and needed to dive in the core internals of it. Then I realized that EmberJS its rendering engine is designed as a virtual machine! Since I did a course on computer systems it was easy to see understand what they meant with opcodes, a stack and system calls. I think it'd have been magic to me if I didn't follow a course on computer systems.
[1]
* An app that analyzes and displays sentiment on Twitter (basically my bachelor thesis in a web app)
* Their penultimate assignment (a blog in NodeJS) as their ultimate assignment is to make whatever they want to make
* A small app that people could use with the game Maffia to vote people out
* A small website to track hackathons that had a small CMS behind it (I had some designs from a few years ago and always wanted to make it)
[2]
Note: I live in Europe, YMMV in the US (since even coding bootcamp grads sometimes get invited).
[3] Maybe get a degree for credentialism, but only on the side and only if it'd be cheap
I hated my thesis and went to a coding bootcamp to apply as a student. They noticed I could explain things well and understood every slide instantly (thanks to my CS education). They asked me to immediately become an instructor provided I could build a NodeJS app within a month to prove my skills. I've built 4 NodeJS apps within that timeframe [1]. Then I freelanced for a bit.
After graduating I applied to FAANG companies and didn't hear back from any of them and got really disheartened. I always wanted to work at FAANG and they didn't care about my resume or the fact that I completed a master in computer science! That part of my life took 2 years. Don't apply to FAANG when you just finished your CS master and expect them to call back [2]. Now I work at a small company.
If I could do it all over again:
Skip bachelor and master [3]. Why? All I needed was some guidance in the beginning. I knew I wanted to create web apps and websites. Back when I started coding bootcamps weren't a thing, but that's what I needed. What good coding bootcamps allow you to do is teach you how to self-teach yourself whatever you need to learn with computers.
Was university useless? No not at all, but it wasn't efficient with my time. I believe that at least 50% of my time was wasted on stuff I didn't need. The other 50% helped me with learning many tools to understand things very quickly, mostly because I've already seen them before. An example was when I was debugging an issue with EmberJS and needed to dive in the core internals of it. Then I realized that EmberJS its rendering engine is designed as a virtual machine! Since I did a course on computer systems it was easy to see understand what they meant with opcodes, a stack and system calls. I think it'd have been magic to me if I didn't follow a course on computer systems.
[1]
* An app that analyzes and displays sentiment on Twitter (basically my bachelor thesis in a web app)
* Their penultimate assignment (a blog in NodeJS) as their ultimate assignment is to make whatever they want to make
* A small app that people could use with the game Maffia to vote people out
* A small website to track hackathons that had a small CMS behind it (I had some designs from a few years ago and always wanted to make it)
[2]
Note: I live in Europe, YMMV in the US (since even coding bootcamp grads sometimes get invited).
[3] Maybe get a degree for credentialism, but only on the side and only if it'd be cheap