Let me start by saying that the CS market is definitely saturated; there’s no doubt about that. However, I do think the prevalence of the doomer mentality in this sub isn’t just because of that, it’s because people here just aren’t very competent.

I’ve seen plenty of evidence to support this, but the most jarring of which were comments under a meme post. Basically, the meme was about an interview question regarding finding the minimum number in an array, and the joke was that the person sorted the array and returned the number at index 0.

(Paraphrased) The most upvoted comment: What’s wrong? Can someone explain? The second most upvoted comment: Well there’s no issue with doing this, it just wasn’t what the interviewer was expecting. (No, these comments weren’t jokes)

It wasn’t until I had to scroll through 4 or 5 comments did I find someone actually pointing out how cooked the comment section was. What I’m trying to say is that, the fact that these comments—making mistakes about something so elementary in the CS roadmap—were the most upvoted, truly goes to show how incompetent a large portion of the subreddit is. Yes, getting a job will be difficult, but if this is your competition, then I think you should take a large portion of these posts with a grain of salt.

Stop paying this dude 60$ when it's already open source. Just get an API key and you're good to go.

https://github.com/Ornithopter-pilot/interview-coder-withoupaywall-opensource

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/2707345

Is this something that has happened before? Should those who have already accepted offers be worried about them being rescinded?

Okay real talk. Why is my entire feed filled with 21, 22, 23 year-olds claiming they started a company in school, it’s “funded,” they have “investors,” and they’re showing off mockups like they’re pitching to Shark Tank in their dorm room??

Like… where are these startups even going?
Are they real companies or just aesthetic side quests for clout?

And don’t even get me started on the ones who pivot 3 months later and suddenly they’re selling “How to Start a Startup” courses for $297 on their Insta bios. Bro. You made a Notion page and a Canva logo, calm down.

Is this all smoke and mirrors or am I just a hater?
Do real investors actually care when every student and their cat has a “startup”?

Would love to hear from anyone who’s actually built something or been on the VC side of things. What’s real and what’s just curated BS for the gram?

EDIT: I’m not knocking young founders — respect if you're building real sh*t. I'm just tired of the performative nonsense.

hey guys. i have been a very avid follower of csmajors for a while, which also means i've been depressed every once in a while haha. my fear of the job market has loomed ever since i completed high school, and internships felt like a very far away thing. i'm a 4.0 student (both high school and university) and have taken courses like harvard's cs50, MANY courses by Code with Mosh, Angela Yu, etc., but i always felt my chances at internships were null because of the stuff i saw here.

fast forward to now, i'm in my freshman year (took a couple gap years after high school) and started applying to internships last year, but very selectively. i didn't want to follow everyone's narrative and apply to 300+ companies. i applied to only 3 last year and got an interview and subsequent offer letter for the summer—i was shocked lol. after only 3 apps? the role wasn't what i wanted tho—quality analyst at a big tech company—so i tried again this year around feb.

after about 18 apps, i landed an interview for a web dev intern position and approached it strongly. today, i've been offered the position! granted, it's a small company (known regionally in the midwest) but it's still completely changed my perspective on how i interact with posts on csmajors.

i realized not many people who succeed post their wins, and this is why csmajors can be so depressing. the successes are drowned out by so many rejection posts that the sub becomes out of touch with reality. i hope this post can lift someone’s spirit and encourage them to apply boldly. after this summer's internship, i plan to apply much earlier in the cycle and approach them with a lot more confidence! will make another post to get advice for my first internship soon!

About a year ago I posted how desperate I was that I couldn't find an internship for last summer, and, as I was about to become a senior, I thought I was a failure.

Now, I can proudly say I got 3 internship offers, after hundreds of applications, and will now be interning at Capital One for the summer. Sometimes you just need to stick for a little longer for things to get better. I am hoping for the best of luck to everyone!

aight a little hopecore for you doomers before i leave this sub for good. I'm 30+ started studying cs by myself got into wgu and found a 200k job in exactly 1 year. keep your hopes up and just continue submitting. dm me if you need guidance or vent. cheers

Currently I was able to get an unpaid internship due to knowing someone in the industry; I was wonderng whether it's worth it generally. I feel it could help me with experience on my resume, but I'm just curious

I’m a senior in CS at a pretty much no name school and I’ve been struggling to land offers for internships after over 400+ applications. I have no internship experience at all, just some fellowships and projects. My resume is decent enough to where I get responses back. I’ve had three final round interviews (one referral) and no offers.

The thing is, I’m not fumbling at all. For behavioral interviews, I arrive early, dress nice, I make the interviewers laugh, I answer the questions confidently, they usually ask follow ups and try to learn more, I ask good questions at the end and I’ve ALWAYS researched the company’s values and try and tailor my stories so they sound like I’m one of them. On top of that, the stories I tell aren’t even fake, I have so many STAR stories that I use for different occasions and I’m always genuine.

For technicals, I’ve passed every single one. I’ve given the most optimal solution and I feel like I do decent enough in terms of communicating my thought process. For the technicals where they ask basic OOP questions, I ace them with perfect examples and explanations. Or the ones where you do a deep dive on projects you’ve done. I explain thoroughly about a specific backend process I designed, I come prepared with diagrams of the data pipelines, and numbers to prove from tests I’ve ran.

Anyways, I know I’m ready for an internship and I’ve practiced for months being confident, grinding leetcode, and just overall learning to be a better engineer through projects. Keep in mind, my projects are pretty decent, I don’t make simple to-do apps, I’ve made things that actually solve problems and require a decent amount of database design.

When I’ve gotten rejections, I always email the recruiter and ask where I fell short, what I could have done better, what did the other candidates have that I didn’t, etc. They always respond with “we were impressed by your skills and we loved learning about you, but we had a lot of qualified candidates and it was a tough decision”. First of all, they say that shit to everyone but I’m sure there’s some truth to it. I’m assuming they mean I did good, but everyone else who did good already had internship experience, so it just makes sense to hire them over me.

My question to you all is, how did you guys do it? To the ones who had zero experience, cold applied, and landed an offer, how did you do it? What did you do that wowed the interviewers, how did you beat the odds and competed against other candidates who are more qualified than you? Thanks for any help.

I saw so many people are still using spreadsheet for tracking their leetcode submission - and I thought to myself hm that's not convenient

That's why i created spacecode.me :)). This can be used to track your leetcode submission, and based on your submission, I used the FSRS algo to automatically determine when you should retry the question

I also included some flashcard capabilities there - for people who wants to do leetcode on the bus. The way it works is that: you see the questions - guess the approach, and you can see the solution later (and check if your solution is correct or false!).

Try it - if you like it please tell your friends! This is still a beta app and I'm still developing it... if you sign up now most likely I'll upgrade you to paid user once it's already in production

thanks!!

PS: it's supposed to be a mobile app :)) but you can also access it from PC

Someone hit me with the classic “if you're looking to make this a career, pick one thing and level up... that’s what companies want” and like, i get it, but also? nah

I am a cs major and I’m not tryna live my whole uni life based on what companies might wanna see on a resume. I’ve been deep into CS way before i started uni. I self-taught a lotta stuff just cuz it was fun. and I’m still in that mindset.

I got a MERN stack webapp, i mess around with game dev in C#, do some C++ with arduino, and use python daily to automate random shit that makes my life easier (or dumber lol). like right now i got an ubuntu laptop doing systemctl status every 0.4 sec just cuz it looks cool. i don’t even use that laptop for anything but hosting my apps anyway so why not?

Im just testing the waters, learning what’s fun, going with what sparks my interest at the time. i don’t think we gotta pick one lane super early. the CS field is massive, and uni is one of the few times we get to explore it freely.

I’m not gonna let curiosity die just to look like a cookie-cutter applicant. if what i offer doesn’t vibe with a company, then we just ain’t a fit. it is as simple as that.

Dont feel pressure. it’s okay to explore. don’t kill your passion for some checklist you didn’t even make.

Hey everyone,

Recently I was offered both Meta and QRT new grad positions. Just wondering which will you choose and appreciate any comments about why!

Some additional useful information

• Meta: EE team, product generalist (Fullstack)
• QRT: Quant Dev

Compensation: QRT TC > Meta TC

Seen it as a growing backend language this year. Wondering if it’s worth adding to my tech stack or just learning it

I was admitted to the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and the University of Utah. As an international student, I can't be a resident of any state. The reason why I applied for these three universities is that I like these two western states. After deducting the scholarship, the annual tuition of the U of Arizona is about $25,000, and the annual tuition for ASU and U of Utah is both about $35,000.

Although ASU has made remarkable achievements in research, I heard that undergrad CS courses of ASU has been quite chaotic in recent years, so I may not consider it for the time being. U of U may be more famous than the other two in the field of CS, but I'm not sure if it's worth spending an extra $10,000 a year for it. I'm not in a hurry to find a job after graduating from undergraduate. I may prefer to complete a postgraduate degree. Could you give me some advice?

Hey folks, I just received a take-home assessment invitation labeled as a "Project" on HackerRank. Normally, with these take-home assignments, you get something like 2–3 days to work on it at your own pace, right?

But in this one, it says I have 3 days to start the assessment—not 3 days to finish it. Once I open the link and start the test, I only get 120 minutes (2 hours) to complete and submit everything.

I’m a little thrown off because I was expecting a typical take-home assignment where I could pace myself and put in more thoughtful work over a few days. Instead, it feels more like a timed coding challenge disguised as a “project.”

Has anyone else come across this kind of setup on HackerRank? Is this normal now? Should I treat it like a live test or prep as if it were a full-on take-home?

Appreciate any insights!

I’m currently a CS major and I know the fundamentals of C++, Java, and Python, and I can read HTML/CSS pretty well. Lately, I’ve been learning the Spring Boot framework with Java and honestly, I really enjoy it. The problem is I don’t see a lot of “cool-looking” projects that come out of Java/Spring compared to some other stacks. Most of the stuff I see is more enterprise-y or boilerplate-heavy.

I’m also thinking about joining hackathons soon, but using Java + Spring Boot feels kinda heavy and not really hackathon-friendly. I don’t think I could contribute much beyond basic backend stuff in that environment, especially compared to people using JS stacks.

That got me wondering—should I start learning JavaScript and maybe dive into something like Node.js, Express, or even fullstack stuff like Next.js just to be more job-ready and flexible? My long-term goal is to become a backend SWE and eventually branch into DevOps or Cloud roles.

Would love to hear from people who’ve been in the same boat. Did switching stacks help? Is Spring Boot still worth investing more time in?

Hey folks! 👋

I got super frustrated constantly losing track of my conversations with GPTs (Chat, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity). Whether it was a killer prompt, a useful code snippet, or just an interesting thread—finding it again later was a nightmare. So, I built a solution:

👉 Chat Saver Chrome Extension Chrome Extension

💡 What it does:

• One-click save: Capture any chat instantly from any GPTs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude)
• Offline storage: All data stays securely in your browser—nothing gets uploaded.
• Built-in search: Find past conversations lightning fast.
• Organized & easy to navigate: Stop endlessly scrolling through chat histories.

Whether you're using AI for study, coding, research, or fun, this makes it 100x easier to reference and reuse past insights.

🔒 No login. No data tracking. Just a clean local experience.

Would love for you to try it out and tell me what you think! Feedback, feature requests, or bug reports are super welcome 🙏

I'm going to graduate next year with no internship experience. If I take a year or two after graduation to work some random unrelated job and get some really good projects done, can I succeed? Like if I make some really cool functional games and websites, make a github and make YouTube content about them, will I be able to get a job?

i have 2 years of experience and a BS in computer science but as you guys know the job market is absolute shit. here are some tricks that not a lot of people know about.

Slack communities are very under-rated. Join slack communities of people in your industry, in my example (Startup SWEs in SF). Those types of communities are amazing, you network with people directly.

GitHub is also very under-rated. If you are looking for internships there are many github repos that have lists of jobs you should look into. Simplify's big github repo is a very good example. Moreover, there are many github open source projects that in the end of the readme have a "we are hiring". If you search github for "hiring", etc they will come up!

Company blogs are also a very good place to find jobs. If you look at some blog posts from a company, especially technical blog posts, they will have a "we are hiring" link. Moreover, you can see the person who wrote it, that is usually the hiring manager. Reach out to them, and you know exactly what to talk about, the article!! Usually those roles are less competitive as well because they are not being advertised as heavily.

You have to apply to a ton of roles. There is not getting around that. 100s is the minimum now. The job market is absolutely brutal especially for those early career people. Download the Simplify extensions and all your manual applications should go through them. Furthermore, use a ApplyheroAI to have it automatically apply to the jobs for you. There is not way around this, you won't stand a chance applying to 5-10 roles in this market!

Use advanced search features on Google: site:*.edu | site:*.org | site:*.gov -inurl:(login | sign up) "job opening". If you type what's inside the ``, into google you will see if finds edu, org, and gov job openings for you. Those roles are so much less competitive that you stand a way higher chance. Ask chatgpt on more queries on how you can do this for tech etc, it works extremely well.

i hope those tricks help! i wanted to give me to the reddit job communities because i actually learned a lot of tricks from them on my job search. Most of these tricks I learned from reddit! let me know if I can help with anything else :)

I cleared my first and second stages (1 prelim + 3 rounds) for the Bangalore APM role. But they’re only taking 1 more round for me, I’ve heard they usually take 2. Is this a bad sign? Should I be worried?

never heard anyone talk abt the utm cs co op and how it compares to other unis should I go to utm for prestige or would I simply be better off going to somewhere like Carleton, mac,queens or western to get a job at a big tech company or a startup.