slunk

The difference, as I understand it, is actually pretty simple... This suggests to me that the confusion is due to the synonymy of the terms in common usage. Without making any claims about the quality of this presentation specifically, I wonder why anyone would insist on using them and inevitably have to lecture perfectly smart people about why they don't mean the same thing...

To be clear, the reason why I find this impressive is because I would assume it implies a significant amount of studying in his free time since computer architecture isn't exactly standard high school curriculum.

It might just be the high school I attended but I can only think of one kid out of about 3000 in the entire school who was intimidatingly competent with computers. I can see where you're coming from. Making too big of a deal out of his age might be annoying to some people but with age comes experience and all the anecdotal evidence at my disposal says that most high schoolers don't have this experience yet. :/

"Wow, tough crowd here."

Yeah, no kidding. I just graduated from a computer engineering program and I still find this impressive, especially for a high school student. What could I do with a computer right out of high school? Code some java or c++ (poorly) and install linux on it? That's about it.

I'm hoping this thread will be a good place to get some advice. I'm about to finish undergrad. I was thinking about going to grad school but I really wanted to take a break from academia to see if I would prefer working at a startup. I've found that it is a lot harder than I expected to get hired.

I have an extremely good academic record but I can't say I blame companies for not taking that too seriously. I only have one big non-class coding project to my name and it was for research. Sadly, I focused too much on school in the past 4 years and not enough on personal projects. I obviously can't just tell people I'm a good fucking programmer. There is no reason to believe me. Is the best solution to forget job applications for now and start working on a project of my own?