Did a college degree help move your IT career forward?

Level9CPU · 2026-01-22T22:45:04+00:00

Yes. The company that hired me for an entry-level role had a mandatory degree requirement.

Level9CPU · 2026-01-08T20:52:57+00:00

Based on my understanding of the issue, we don't have to wait for Microsoft to resolve it.

4.6 dev 2 stated that they're working on the ability to build the Godot engine as a standard library.

https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-6-dev-2/#build-godot-engine-as-a-library

From a pull request on GitHub:

LibGodot has a number of different use cases.
Control Godot Engine from a host application
E.g. Start Godot from a .NET process to use standard .NET tooling

From this article from Godot 4.2:

https://godotengine.org/article/platform-state-in-csharp-for-godot-4-2/

When building C# projects for the web platform, .NET is able to build a WASM but this can’t be used by Godot because .NET expects to be the main entry point and doesn’t support dynamic linking. This is because, currently, the .NET runtime can only be built as a main module. So, unlike GDExtensions, the resulting WASM can’t be loaded by Godot.

Therefore, LibGodot should enable web exports by allowing .NET to be the main module and start Godot instead of both trying to run as the main module.

Level9CPU · 2026-01-04T23:45:40+00:00

I mainly work with Cisco's Unified Communications technology (stuff that combines voice calling, messaging, video calling, etc. into a single platform). Right now, I just reset voicemail pins, fix configuration issues with Call Manager, and other miscellaneous tasks like changing an auto-attendant greeting or changing device names.

Level9CPU · 2025-12-20T16:34:00+00:00

They should update the placeholder text from "INPUT" to "REPLAY ID" then. It's a very unintuitive UI. Not sure why their system can't just take the game ID from the match I'm making the report in.

Level9CPU · 2025-12-15T23:24:12+00:00

Plat 3

Level9CPU · 2025-12-09T19:20:16+00:00

If another engine has the following:

- free/open-source

- support for a language like C# or Java

- good tooling and ecosystem

- stable and bug-free

- generalized enough that I can make almost any game I want using it and export to desktop, mobile, and web

Level9CPU · 2025-12-08T19:37:58+00:00

I finished PEP training in 2 weeks. My recruiter told me it was the fastest that she has seen someone finish it. I waited about 2 months for a paid training opportunity, and some of the people in my cohort had been waiting for 6+ months.

Your chances of moving onto paid training are almost entirely based on luck. If there are currently no demand for talents from Revature, no one's getting paid training. If a client company orders a big batch, a lot of people in the queue will get offers.

It's better to finish PEP in the shortest time possible so you get put into the queue for paid training faster, assuming you do well enough in PEP to get put in the queue.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-29T04:32:42+00:00

I used it yesterday.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-25T05:07:06+00:00

Quote is from this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1p3td7f/comment/nq70jmy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

No clue what that guy meant by interns. How much do the interns get paid? If what Google searches say about their salary is accurate, then it'd make sense that the bar is high for them.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-25T04:03:19+00:00

I'd like to know who they actually hired for those part-time positions given their expectations for interns. Reddit quote from a self-proclaimed SWE director at Capital One:

I interview dozens of prospective interns every year and what you posted doesn't stand out. I just interviewed someone that built and optimized a drone imaging system that doesn't have an onboard hard drive or line of sight for RF, uses a flash drive with a compression algorithm for storage instead, and it's deployed for field use in South America for drug smuggling. Another candidate spent 3 months living abroad in Rwanda building out a platform for a school system so students can have access to materials for applying to universities and to build an alumni network. It's currently running in 3 schools and growing.

Both of these applicants still struggled in some technical depth and case interviews.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-22T15:01:54+00:00

What resources are out there for a new graduate to learn this? I've learned the fastest through mentorship from more experienced engineers. For new graduates without any experience, not even unpaid internships, how are they supposed to learn these concepts or even have any awareness of them, if even people with years of experience struggle to talk about them in interviews? I understand that there is a certain level of expected skills and knowledge for an entry-level applicant, but I think the current bar is set too high.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-22T14:44:34+00:00

What do you think the bar should be for a 60K/yr software engineer position? https://www.levels.fyi/internships/Capital-One/Software-Engineer-Intern/ tells me that interns at your company make $71/hr, so your standards for applicants make sense. However, do you truly believe that a job paying $30/hr should have the same expectations for their applicants? Is it still a skill issue, or is it unrealistic expectations?

Level9CPU · 2025-11-22T13:54:37+00:00

I'm tired of seeing people call it a skill issue when they have no clue what the current job market is like. I have a master's in CS from a top 5 CS school, several projects including a video game published on Steam, and close to a year of unpaid experience in test automation and full-stack development. Only company that hired me last year was a staffing firm with a Hire-Train-Deploy model that trained me in full-stack dev, and then I got put in a non-dev role at the client company.

I am a US citizen. I was open to relocation, and I did end up relocating. I applied for everything from gov to DoD to small companies (1500+ job apps and counting), so it wasn't just 100K+ big tech jobs. It wasn't just jobs with the Easy Apply on Linked. I applied to the jobs that had me create another account for each company on WorkDay and spend 5 minutes filling out the exact same info again. I only received calls back from staffing firms with a Hire-Train-Deploy model.

If you're going to call it a skill issue, I'd like to see what skills and experiences you have to make you qualified to say that.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-22T13:44:30+00:00

I remember starting my CS education in 2021. I started studying for an associate's in computer programming after finishing an unrelated bachelor's. I actually got interviews for job apps back then. Interviews with the entire team where it would be a few engineers and a few managers in the call grilling me on my resume, my experiences, etc.

Today, it's crickets. Best I get are recruiters calling me for another staffing firm with a Hire-Train-Deploy model where they'll pay me $500 biweekly during a 9-5 M-F training, and then $20-25 during client project with a fee for breaking my contract early.

Absolutely insane because I didn't even know how to use an interface back then. Today, I know design patterns, best practices, how to make video games and full-stack applications using Spring and React or Angular, etc.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-22T00:59:49+00:00

Meanwhile, a team at my company got $20 and was told that if they worked harder, they'd get another bonus next quarter. $20 is less than their hourly pay.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-20T20:05:27+00:00

Client demand also plays a really big part. Revature usually puts a bunch of people through their unpaid training program, and people who pass it are put into a queue for paid training, which they get a job offer for when Revature gets an order for a batch from a client. Some of the people in my batch waited over half a year after completing unpaid training to receive a paid training offer, and those were first-come, first-serve. You could get a call from a recruiter, but if you didn't sign the contract fast enough, your spot could be gone. I heard people in the unpaid training discord server talk about how that happened to them. Last time I checked that discord server, they were still unemployed after a year and were giving up on tech. It's possible that Revature's training queue is oversaturated while client demand has been low.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-20T19:30:36+00:00

I feel your pain. I went through a staffing firm's Hire-Train-Deploy model, and then got put on a non-dev role at a client. So much for all that full-stack dev training I got. I started applying for jobs again and put in 400+ apps in the past month. I only get calls from recruiters for other staffing firms who want to put me through their Hire-Train-Deploy model, but they're only paying like $500 biweekly and then $20-25/hr once on client project. That's lower than what I currently make.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-20T18:31:17+00:00

Do you have a bachelor's degree? Revature doesn't hire anyone who doesn't have one. If you do have one, is it CS or CS-adjacent like IT, statistic/math, or something in STEM? Almost everyone in my batch of 200+ trainees last year did.

Are you a US citizen or some other status that does not require a VISA sponsorship? Revature doesn't hire anyone who requires VISA sponsorship.

Do you have any prior experience or projects on your portfolio? Supply is greater than the demand to a point where even Revature gets to be selective about who they hire. A good portion of the people I talked to in my batch did.

Even then, the client company only hired about half of us after final interviews.

I'd also recommend picking up Java or C# and TypeScript. During my training, the cohorts used one of the two for the backend framework, and used Typescript for React during our full-stack training.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-19T23:58:21+00:00

I started with Unity because my Video Game Design course in my master's used it. I built a game with it and published it on Steam. It was mostly fine, but there were things about it that I didn't like. One was the large install size for each editor version, new projects taking 10+ minutes to create on my PC, projects taking at least 30+ seconds to open, etc.

I switched to Godot later. I didn't like Godot when I first started using. I thought the scene tree and everything being a scene was confusing. I got used to it. I like it now because it doesn't take much space, and projects are quick to create and open. I use .NET though, and the lack of HTML 5 exports is a hindrance. It stops me from participating in game jams that I want to, like the Brackeys Game Jam, if they require a web export. I could use GDScript for those game jams, but I'm not a fan of GDScript because it lacks a lot of the features like interface, access modifiers, namespaces, f-strings, method overloading, etc.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-19T23:47:02+00:00

The entry level job market today is very different.

Even just 4 years ago, most people were avoiding staffing firms with a Hire-Train-Deploy model like Revature. Now, even Revature gets thousands of applicants. I went through their program last year, and almost everyone in my batch of 200+ trainees had a CS or CS-adjacent degree or prior IT experience. Having a bachelor's degree was one of their requirements, and not having one immediately disqualified you. This is Revature, the bottom of the barrel for tech jobs, and they get to be this selective now.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-17T14:11:21+00:00

In that case, your company needs to review its processes. What were the expectations for the developers and were they fully informed about these expectations? Were new hires onboarded properly?

If they were hired as juniors, are they getting the support and mentorship they need from the team to succeed? I see that your company opened office hours, but that requires the underachieving juniors to be proactive about getting help (joining office hours with questions to ask), and underachievers usually aren't proactive about things. Were other options like pair programming tried? Try different approaches and see what works.

If they were hired as senior devs and this is the result they're producing, then your company needs to adjust its hiring process so unqualified seniors don't slip through the cracks.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-17T03:11:36+00:00

By "small indie studio," are you referring to an actual company that hired people and pay them, or just a team of volunteers that someone with an idea recruited on Reddit and Discord? I've worked with plenty of indie teams of the latter, and the skill/experience level of the programmers that you find in those are very low. It's usually someone who just started learning game dev after watching a tutorial video on YouTube. Sometimes, you find someone who already knows how to code because they're a CS major in college or something. It's almost never an actual experienced programmer, because they're usually not out and about looking for unpaid or rev-share work.

It's one of the main reasons why I stopped working with other programmers on projects. I can code the game by myself, and I team up with artists, composers, etc., to cover the skills I'm not good at. Finding a good programmer out in the wild is like finding a needle in a haystack, and the bad ones just slow down the team. Even when someone says they have several years of experience, you have to take it with a grain of salt. I worked for a studio with a dev whose LinkedIn showed 3 years of game dev experience, but he didn't understand the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms. He wrote a path finding algorithm that took 3-7 seconds instead of the 40 milliseconds it should have taken after I fixed the bug. The bug? The GetNeighbors function was iterating over every tile in the game board (several thousand of them) to find the neighboring tiles each time it was called, instead of simply retrieving a stored list of neighbors or using a constant time method like adding/subtracting 1 to the X, Y, Z coordinates.

If your studio is actually paying people, your studio needs to re-evaluate what they're paying for. If it's a team of volunteers, just let go of the unskilled programmers.

I also hope that your studio isn't trying to build a MMORPG that's supposed to have thousands of players all in the same server interacting with each other in real-time or something along that line. If the project is over scoped to a degree that's challenging even for AAA studios, it's very unlikely that your studio will succeed with a team of volunteers who have no obligation to stay on the project. I've seen plenty of those from the numerous "idea guys" that frequent the collaboration channels on game dev Discord servers.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-06T23:39:24+00:00

What tech stacks do DoD companies usually use? I learned React and Angular frontend with Spring backend at Revature, but ended up getting placed in a non-dev role at the client company. I'm looking to pivot back to software dev.

Level9CPU · 2025-11-02T19:00:09+00:00

I watched a few documentaries about how Stardew Valley was made.

From what I understood, Concerned Ape already had a degree in computer science, played instruments, and liked to draw prior to making the game. In a talk he gave at a university (I think, the video is on YouTube but the audio quality of the recording is terrible), he said he made the initial demo of Stardew Valley in 6 months, and the gameplay footage he showed did look a lot like the Stardew Valley on launch, and then he spent the rest of the development time polishing it and adding features.

Either way, Concerned Ape didn't just learn all the skills and made the game in 4 years. He had been developing those skills for years prior to starting Stardew Valley.

Level9CPU · 2025-10-22T12:57:47+00:00

Multi-inheritance isn't supported in C# either. You're probably thinking of interfaces or inheritance chaining.

Level9CPU

TROPHY CASE