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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

I am not an expert, but

#1. You are average of 5 peers you hang out with (a good thumb rule).

#2. There is a huge valley between Software Engineering vs Computer Science (what is your goal here.)

For #1. meet-ups and getting programmer mentor is good idea.

If you really want to do pure CS, there is no alternative to college, but for Software Gig, a good programmer mentor gives better direction than College/University.

edit: this advice is primarily for second/third tier universities or comparing with them.

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Yet none of that matters if top companies don't interview at your school for internships...which they don't for the most part.

Top company internships certainly HELP, but you are really aren't that far behind if you don't get them.

Getting a job right out of college is hard. Everyone is looking for a year of experience.

But once you get that FIRST job, things are smooth sailing. I never got recruitment message in college, but after I had graduated, and was working for a year, I starting getting multiple every week.

Top company jobs, are of course awesome. But if you don't get them right out of college, you can pretty easily do it after a year or 2 of working in the industry in SF.

My biggest concern is salary trajectory. For instance, a converting intern at FB gets $75-125K signing over a normal new grad hire (just an example, less applicable to me specifically).

O.o Are the numbers really that high? Boy have I been in the startup industry for way too long....

FB is an exception to the rule here.

I dunno, I hear similar things about all of the big 5

That's not including RSUs too, just cash.

You can always reach out to companies yourself.

I graduated from a second-tier university in a small eastern-european university and did find internship opportunities in SV so I can assert with confidence: your options are what you make of them with your own skills, aptitude and attitude.

I accepted an offer for the summer from a company that doesn't recruit at my school anymore.

But my options still pale in comparison to what people at top tier schools have. Sad to say my overall salary trajectory is probably going to suffer because of it when I look fulltime.

If you're doing an internship, you already have a leg up on a lot of the people at top tier schools.

I mean, I'd wager most of them intern at top tier places multiple years, whereas I'm only going to intern in a big company for one summer. I'd be surprised if they didn't at all, honestly.

I didn't manage to land any interviews at "top" companies when I was in college, but I think that was largely because I applied way too late (apparently for companies like Google,FB, etc, you need to apply by like November of the year before for internships). However, I do know other people who managed to get Amazon, Microsoft, and Google internships even though they didn't interview at our school, so there seems to be some way to get in by applying yourself.

I've heard from one person that they managed to get an interview at FB by first getting an internship at Amazon so you can try that. I suspect this is how I got my interviews (for full time positions though) at Google/FB as well.

Google was at the career fair at my university. I went and talked to them. They said apply online. I did that, did phone interviews and got an internship.

So at least for Google, they don't need to come to your college.

You can apply online to top companies. You won't go nearly as far if you passively wait for opportunity to come to you.

Top companies get tens of thousands of resumes from undergrads. They actively recruit mostly at only a few prestigious schools because it's an easy filter for candidates without job histories and therefore lacking strong signals. If you're not going to one of the schools they care about you need to be able to give a really good reason why you should stand out.

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