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

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Eh, I thought I was OK going into my career out of college only to find out I learned more 3 months on the job than I did in the classroom. About the only practical experience I got in college was in labs setting up environments. So don't sweat not knowing. You'll get direction in an entry level position, then you can work on your own stuff, or you can find a topic that interests you and work on it on the side like a video game or tool or website. My current side projects usually help me in my current career. So I picked up a skill that I never learned when I exited my first career (docker administration) and I feel like a goober for not learning in the past.

I know why i didn't learn it though. One, two, skip a few, after burnout and changing careers, my skills look like they could come back in fashion for moving stuff back to on premise and I could be useful again (IT) especially for small clusters, networking, and specialized local application support, so at least I have a backup plan for when AI takes over my current line of work.

I guess my point is the job is kinda like a better one stop shop that pays you to learn the specifics whose bosses should get you the guidance at least with incentivized goals; money.

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You're studying to be a programmer, right? You don't mention your comfort language, so I'm going to try to keep this language agnostic.

Here's what you do:

Figure out the absolute simplest application you could possibly build. I'm going to suggest a to-do app, because it's traditional and it's a dead simple concept.
Figure out the absolute simplest version of that application. I'm thinking it just renders a hard-coded list of to-dos with exactly one piece of interactivity, a button to cross off an entry.
Add another piece of interactivity: Make the rendered text of a to-do entry editable.
Add another piece of interactivity: Make the list resettable, so your edits and cross-offs vanish.
Add another piece of interactivity: Make it possible to add entries to the list.
Add another piece of interactivity: Make it possible to turn the list green.
Add another piece of interactivity: Make it possible to remove entries from the list.
Keep adding visible features until the frontend is the best goddamn to-do list you can make.
Create a backend. Your backend has a database (such as MySQL). It has one table, which contains every to-do.
Your backend should expose a REST API. If you don't know what that is, read up on it. They're very simple. Long story short, it's a means of sending and receiving structured JSON.
Here's where your app gets real: The REST API can read from and write to the database. That means no more hard-coded entries on the frontend. Your frontend will now read from the REST API when it loads, and populate the to-do list from it. When you delete an entry, it will be removed from the database. When you cross one off or turn it green, it will change in the database.
Congratulations, you've built a rudimentary real-world application!

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I felt the same way you do when I was in my last year of college. I remember being really nervous about it and thinking that they didn’t give me any real world experience, but you’ll get that when you find a job. The job I got out of college was in a programming language that was so foreign to me (and probably most people) that I had no idea what I was doing, but you end up adapting and using the constructs they’ve taught you.

I’ve been working in tech for 24 years now and still feel like I don’t know enough for my job most days. The good thing is that it’s a constant learning experience I guess.

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