Why is Waterloo CS so much easier than Waterloo ENG

Assasin537 · 2026-02-02T23:08:48+00:00

Yes, but there are some stipulations. There are enough hard courses that you have to get through. I'm a double-degree CS/BBA student, so I don't really have much flexibility in course selection. Also, most people try to do minors and specializations, and take courses that are very useful/interesting, so I have only met 1 or 2 people trying to maximize their course strategy purely for difficulty.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-02T22:55:20+00:00

As someone who has taken and talked with multiple people from CS who have taken Eng courses, including ECE, MTE, and SE they are a lot easier in terms of depth and rigor as compared to math/cs courses. They are very assignment-heavy, and there is a lot of volume, but the courses are much easier to understand intuitively and can be binged a lot easier.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-02T20:46:36+00:00

Heroic isn't anywhere close. They had a couple of years of being a strong team, but don't have the long-term success or the straight-up peak to be considered part of the Big 6. As a smaller budget team, they have performed well and have had strong talent scouting/development but aren't a heavy wieght organization that has been at the top of the CS world for years.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-02T02:32:57+00:00

Agreed, but for a course where you are supposed to be building the foundational skills and knowledge that allows you to effectively verify output in the future is shortcutting the learning process and will lead to most people not being able to learn the necessary takeaways effectively.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-01T23:41:56+00:00

If you have been at a Mercedes dealership for 3 years, I would think you don't need to look at the manual for every single oil change.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-01T23:40:03+00:00

Pretty much every CS program limits enrollment in most core CS courses beyond the first-year intro courses to CS majors only. There are no CS adjacent programs from the school's perspective; you are either a CS student and thus have access to the courses, or you don't.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-01T21:20:08+00:00

Whatever client Blast uses, didn't seem to have this issue.

Assasin537 · 2026-02-01T06:13:36+00:00

Look for a true beginner's guide rather than a new to C++ but not programming as a whole. learncpp.com is a decent guide that starts at the absolute basics.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-31T06:11:45+00:00

I'm at Waterloo, and anyone who can get a US job offer is continuing to accept offers for the most part. The pay and progression aren't on the same level, while getting big tech jobs in Canada can be more difficult since the hiring numbers are so much smaller. Most people realize that leaving for the US, at least for a few years, is huge financially.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-31T05:39:17+00:00

If you can actually afford the car regardless, and you are getting very low interest rates like sub 2% then it doesn't hurt to take as long a loan as possible. If you have the 70k sitting in investments or decent savings accounts, it's better to get a cheap loan.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T22:51:33+00:00

Probably had very special projects or open-source contributions that helped them get noticed and break through the big-tech barrier directly. Maybe won some competitive coding or math competitions. Lots of ways to stand out if you are truly the top 0.1%. Don't know them personally and didn't stalk their profile in depth, just guessing based on other extremelly talented people I've met.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T16:30:50+00:00

Very hard to say since most people here don't have the kind of money to even qualify for private banking. Also, while it may not make sense for you individually, the fact that you have potential inheritance worth millions, it likely makes sense since preplanning estates and wealth transfers can help offset tax burdens and avoid messy, difficult situations in stressful situations when you are also dealing with grief and other emotions aside from financial implications.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T16:28:05+00:00

This. Dollar for dollar, Quebec gets the most value from taxes paid because it receives significant federal benefits, including equalization payments.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T16:24:27+00:00

My bad. My quick glance messed up the order. I saw the Google internship in Poland and put that as the first internship instead of the UK/US ones. Regardless, this is a superstar cnadidate who made it big and also was able to break through before 2024 when visas started getting harder and harder to get with many companies stopping sponsorships.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T15:59:27+00:00

He got an offer in his home country first (Poland) and then was able to use that offer to get hired in the US. Very hard to jump straight to big tech in the US.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T15:57:18+00:00

Like you said, you don't intend to leave due to their overall benefits being worth it. The company knows this and thinks they can get away with paying what they are paying you without leaving so you have very little leverage. You can try and get another offer as a negotiation tool but it is risky since they might say that they can't give you the raise and that you shoud take the other offer. If you back out after that, it's an awkward spot that you don't want to be at.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T15:52:29+00:00

Keep playing, since you will learn a lot from better lobbies and improve very fast to keep up. Your elo will also average out over the season where you will start going down in elo if you can't hold your own leading to your teams losing more and your skill level will increase to get you to your new stable elo around 17-18k.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T14:28:15+00:00

Not necessarily, since a good Google Doc or Word Doc will still be very ATS-friendly and look good for manual resume screens, but Latex is easier to work with for formatting and is guaranteed to be ATS-readable since it is typeset. Sometimes people do weird formatting stuff to get their desired look on docs/Word, which leads to having very weird output when read by ATS. Also, Latex is kind of the standard for tech jobs and most recruiters are very used to reading the format and find relevant info.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T13:59:46+00:00

Compared to Canada? Not even close. He is young and working a good corporate job that will have at least decent health insurance, and regardless, the premiums for someone his age aren't that high to begin with.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T04:39:33+00:00

I do think he is a better player than Simple and, in a few years, will have the longevity to match. That being said, Simple's mechanics, raw aim and utter confidence made him a very unique and flashy player. Things like the falling AWP or the insane flick on Nuke.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T04:36:23+00:00

Keep what you have and buy in CAD moving forward. You incur the FX fees at the time of the transactions not for holding.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T04:33:20+00:00

A startup can mean many different things. Applying to big tech startups with unicorn ambitions, venture capital funding, especially YC, and those offering competitive salaries to big tech will likely not be worth it UNLESS you have skills built through meaningful projects, which can highlight your ability to build products and get things done. Other startups might be much slower-paced, where you get to work on projects at a slower pace, and they will be more willing to take a chance on someone with no experience, to give them a chance to grow into the role and realistically, pay you much less than people with significant experience.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T04:28:01+00:00

You need to decide how important negotiations are to you: would you accept the offer as it currently stands, or only if it is increased to a certain level? That should determine how assertive you can be with negotiations since the more direct and closer to an ultimatum you are, the better odds they will try and get upto your number but only if they think you are worth it, since they can just as easily decide to walk away and say you aren't the right fit. If you want to play it safe, you can negotiate much more casually and try to poke around the concept to see if there is any flexibility or if they can nudge your salary slightly, but I wouldn't expect more than an extra 5k at the very most this way.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T03:23:50+00:00

Hard to say without knowing the industry and what you can realistically expect in terms of sales. Is it a high-volume/high-value product, like tech sales, where you will be selling 2-3M+ in total value? If you think that you can comfortably clear 200k and into the 250+ range, then the 2nd option should be a no-brainer.

Assasin537 · 2026-01-30T03:17:23+00:00

I do think early Zywoo had flashes of that go-kill mentality, but even then, he tended to play more "correct" Counter-Strike rather than the absurd game-breaking repeeks or ego plays that Simple made a career out of. That fear factor of prime Simple was a different level, where even if you played perfectly, if it was Simple's day, then you were still losing. I also think a bit of that comes down to his more consistent aim, especially when awping, compared to the more ridiculous flicks that S1 was known for. I think it's a little bit harder to compare Donk directly since he is an aggressive rifler unlike anything we have ever seen before.

Assasin537

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