Bro I’m in final year and literally know NOTHING, am I doomed? 😭

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Start it all over. Do things right the second time.

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Keep your mouth shut, and fake it til you make it.

It's what EVERYBODY does. That is literally the key to life that nobody tells you when you are young.

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Tech executive here. The likelihood of you being able to compete as a developer in the current job market when you cannot demonstrate skills, knowledge, or showcase your previous works is negligible. That said, you have access to the internet, FOSS, Git, presumably test environments at your school, teachers and fellow students to ask when you need help, etc.

Find a bunch of problems you'd like to solve or features you'd like to see and spend the next year cranking out projects. Make sure you have a portfolio fo projects that required multiple skillsets to achieve.

Also, there are a lot of free courses and even some certifications out there. AWS, Azure, and GCloud have all sorts of training available for free. Take some and use those skill to run some projects in cloud environments.

CONTAINERS!!!

EDIT:
The best position you can be is one where you don't want a job because you want to build your own thing. Be so good that companies want to compete to hire you away.

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Sounds like it's time to start some basic code camp / code academy / Udemy courses in your off time to catch up.

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Senior UI architect here. I didn't know shit about crap when I graduated college as far as programming, and I was on the fucking Dean's List and graduated with honors. 95% of what I know I learned it on the job after college. Today I work from home and have a comfortable income so don't let your fears take hold. You still have to study on your own creating personal projects which will teach you way more programming than what you learned in college.

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The fact that you are questioning yourself means that you have the ability to introspect. I work at a major university and hire/manage people of all ages--as young as 15 and as old as 65. I have seen all kinds from the super smart and motivated to those who will sit in their position and do the minimum until they retire or those who are so incompetent or incapable of learning that they wash out of their own careers.

You probably compared yourself to that small number of people who did robotics club in high school, got into the elite CS/CE program, and already have a job offer from Meta for $150k. Don't do that, those people aren't normal and have never learned to just live. They also tend to experience constant and unending anxiety, which is why they drive themselves so hard. Do you really want to live that way?

I am always looking for that person who questions themself. If you are concerned about your ability to do something, you will put in the time to make sure that you do it well. If you have a Dunning-Kruger thing going on, then you're going to be a terrible employee and I will eventually resent you and find a way to get you out of my department.

My advice:

accept that you will suffer some form of imposter syndrome for life. This is fine--it is better to be a bit insecure than a bit overconfident. You will constantly work to make sure that what you output is the best quality it can be simply because you are worried that it isn't.
accept that you have little experience in your industry. You're not supposed to as a new graduate. The whole point of your training has been in learning how to think professionally and approach a problem academically. Once you have that basis, you can learn the details.
be kind to yourself. You're your own person and you don't need to use others as a metric. Avoid the "I'm supposed to have..." sort of thinking and just do the best you can.

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Yeah that’s actually reassuring to hear . I keep hearing people say the real learning happens once you’re on the job, but the scary part is getting that first break. That’s why I was thinking — if there was a space where you could practice by picking up real projects (even buying ready-made ones just to see how things are structured), get some guidance/mentorship, and then slowly start putting out your own work… it would make the jump way less intimidating. Feels like that kind of model could really help students like me who are starting late.

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Yeah, true — programming isn’t really something you can fake, especially in a competitive market. If the fundamentals are weak, it shows during interviews. And you’re right, a lot of people with decent knowledge still struggle to land jobs these days, so for someone who coasted through college it feels extra overwhelming.

That said, I don’t think it always has to mean a hard pivot away from tech. I’ve seen people catch up when they start small: buying or downloading existing projects, breaking them apart to see how things actually work, then slowly tweaking/building their own. Pair that with mentorship or guidance from people in the industry, and it creates a shortcut compared to trying to figure out everything alone. Even if it doesn’t guarantee a job, it at least gives you a portfolio and confidence to back yourself.

For those who decide to pivot — HR, ops, etc. like you said — fair enough. But I feel like having an option in between (learn + build + guidance in one place) could really help students who don’t want to give up on tech completely.

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Does your area have any tech meetups? Maybe get out there and talk to people?

For our area, there are makerspaces that curtail to such events. And if you are still lost, there are places like freecodecamp that help out with building your first projects. It has a discord if I recall as well.

GL! Its a VERY hard market right now.

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learn to pass a coding interview. practice the common data structures, focus on one language. hackerrank, leetcode, pluralsight.

they don't care about what you learned in school. school is where you learn to think, and prove you can work hard. i never graduated

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I just recently graduated with a CS bachelors. Honestly I didn't learn too much in college either. Most stuff that was taught in college was stuff I already knew from learning Java on my own so I could make Minecraft mods as a tween.

I wish that modern and widely used frameworks, libraries, etc were something that were taught at college but unfortunately you have to teach yourself this stuff. Right now I am working on and nearly finished with a Spring Boot + React project to add to my portfolio and I had to teach myself both of those. Whatever it is you want to learn, there should be docs and plenty of tutorials out there for it.

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Open source projects are a great resource. My understanding of good software development practices skyrocketed after contributing to a couple.

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I’ve seen people catch up when they start small: buying or downloading existing projects, breaking them apart to see how things actually work, then slowly tweaking/building their own.

That's trying to teach yourself, when a college education didn't work...

Pair that with mentorship or guidance from people in the industry,

What you want is an internship.

Do not under any circumstances pay someone to "mentor" you, no employer will care. An internship looks so much better, it's at least an institutional scam that people still respect.

But I feel like having an option in between (learn + build + guidance in one place) could really help students who don’t want to give up on tech completely.

This isn't an either/or scenario...

You're thinking you have a year, how many calendar months is it to graduation? You should be applying to jobs after this semester, the market fucking sucks.

You need a solid plan, a backup plan, an "oh shit" plan, and an absolutely last resort plan.

You'll be an adult before you know it, and unless you have a personal safety net, you may not have one.

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CS grads are in the worst position ever. University is often mistaken for vocational education, however that would be a technical college.

I have spent a lot of time crossing between a practical education environment, aimed at production skills, and university, aimed at thinking ability and abstract skills.

Honestly, my experience is that students are much more capable in a production environment after a two week boot camp than after three years of university on a roughly parallel topic. However, the non-idiots in the academic case will be able to understand arguments about the context of what they are doing better.

The point is that a philosophy degree might be more employable than a CS degree in some situations. The dude who cofounded Flickr and Slack was working off of an english degree. Use your degree for understanding and some projects for knowledge.

I also have a humanities degree and work in IT, with a wide range of applied skills I learned from necessity instead of a prof.

So create the necessity for skills by making useful shit, or even just fixing things. Find friends and make a silly app. Volunteer at a nonprofit and improve their CRM database. Build a homelab that you share with roommates. Find the local permacomputing group and help them turn all those shitty win10 obsolete machines into sleek linux machines. Ignore money and employment as task criteria for a few years, or freelance IT gigs.

Solve real world problems for real experience.

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Definitely. Also looks good on a resume.

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Facts. Diploma’s just a piece of paper, man. What really counts is the stuff you actually make. Writing, building, whatever — as long as it’s useful and not just textbook bs. Half the time we get stuck solving fake problems no one cares about, instead of creating something we’d actually use ourselves.

Even if it’s messy at first, just grab some project, tear it apart, mess with it, make it your own. That’s where the real learning happens. Guidance helps, sure, but end of the day it’s just you building stuff you vibe with. That’s what actually sticks

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Yeah true, no magic hack here — you gotta put in the hours no matter what. Can’t dodge that part. But I feel like there are ways to make those hours hit harder. Like instead of grinding random theory, grab a project that already exists, break it down, mess with it, and learn as you rebuild. Cuts out a lot of wasted time.

Plus if you’ve got someone experienced to point out “yo, focus here, skip that” it saves weeks of trial and error. So yeah, hours are non-negotiable, but you can still optimize the grind so it doesn’t feel like you’re starting from zero.

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Haha yeah, that hits. School’s mostly just endurance training — sit through boring crap, collect the paper, prove you can stick it out. Doesn’t really mean you walk out job-ready. And you’re right, nobody actually knows anything straight out of school, the real test is how fast you can pick stuff up once you’re tossed into the fire.

That’s why I feel like the smartest move now is just to start building/rewiring your brain through actual projects. Even small ones. Tear something apart, rebuild it, mess with it till it makes sense. Pair that with a bit of guidance from people already in the grind and boom — suddenly you look less like a clueless fresher and more like someone who can adapt fast. And that’s honestly all most companies are looking for anyway.

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Yeah, that’s real. Half the time we forget we actually picked up more than we think — even if it’s just knowing how to structure problems or think a certain way. That stuff does carry over.

And true, no one expects a fresher to roll in like a senior dev. What matters is showing you can learn fast once you’re in the game. That’s why I keep coming back to projects — building stuff, even small hacks, forces you to learn by doing. And if you can get a little feedback along the way, you level up way quicker. That combo of “mindset from uni + learn-by-building” feels like the real win.

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Haha respect that’s the real deal — no college but still mentoring grads shows how little the paper matters compared to hands-on. Books say ROS2, real world says “yo, here’s modbus, break it till it clicks.”

That’s honestly the kind of guidance most freshers need — someone who can cut through the noise and say “this is what actually matters, go tinker.” Makes me think if more of us had that kinda space + mentorship earlier, we wouldn’t waste years stuck in theory.

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Bro I’m in final year and literally know NOTHING, am I doomed? 😭