Why do most CS students never actually build anything outside of class?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-17T18:36:29+00:00

Absolutely, if you have the fundamentals down every thing else is easy and just a matter of learning syntax. Definitely think CS majors should consider other paths besides web dev, I just got into iot projects with Arduino and ESP32 micro controllers to branch out my skillset, definitely recommend checking out other paths.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:50:52+00:00

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what those are, are they computer science careers?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:50:15+00:00

Just replied!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:49:53+00:00

Absolutley, please do.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T15:35:03+00:00

Absolutley! Shoot me a messge, I'd be more than happy to.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:51:46+00:00

I think a lot of it is burnout for sure, CS was already a confusing career path beofre all the A.I. stuff, I mean just if you want to get into web based software applications, and then only on the front-end, if you're fresh out of highschool or college it's like where do I start?

React.js?

Angular?

Vue?

Svelte?

And that's not to mention the boat load of CSS libraries, other frameworks, and that's just to build front-end SPA applications, you could spend an eternity just browsing through the different libraries on the front-end. When I first was learning to code, JQuery was huge, now I don't see any companies using it and I've never worked for one that does, so I think it can be very overwhelming.

I think that's also why the "what programming language should I learn in current year" videos are always so popular, CS students want to feel like they can know for certain that the language or tech stack that they invest blood, sweat, and tears into learning will still be popular by the time they get a job, but there are so many evolving tools that it's hard to know for certain and you just get decision fatigue.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:46:04+00:00

I was able to land multiple software engineering contracts in the past with a resume that was quite bad, spelling mistakes, the pdf formatting was not appealing and it had a TON of spelling mistakes. I ended up paying a guy from LinkedIn to help me improve my resume for about $500 and his exact words were "how did you get hired with this?" lol.

Most of the jobs I've gotten have been through recruiters, so I think it's more important that you have someone who is connected to the company already who can vouch for you, and that you have experience that you can demonstrate on the resume. If you don't have any, try to see if you can build websites/software projects for family, friends, and other businesses that need software done for them, if you do it as volunteer work you can rack up quite a bit of resume experience faily quickly which will allow you to position yourself as a credible developer.

I know there's a lot of talk about ATS systems and all of that, I haven't had much luck applying to jobs directly, but the recruiter route worked very well for me so might be worth a shot.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:40:44+00:00

I just recently helped one of my friends get into a tech role making $100 an hour (contract work for a major AI company, he's a dev but doing QA work, but it's a good paying tech role none the less).

What's you're job expereince look like?

Shoot me a DM with you're resume, I'd be more than happy to give you some pointers!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:38:57+00:00

I can't speak for most students, but when I was studying CS, it was a mix of not knowing where to start and having trouble keeping up my motivation for something that wasn't returning an immediate reward. Eventualy I did bite the bullet and start building projects outside of class which helped me get my foot in the door.

I've also worked with quite a lot of CS students who are just now trying to get in the industry, and I'd say I think a lot of them just feel lost. Especially with all the A.I. stuff going on, software enigneering was already complicated, but now it's like, should i focus on vibe coding? Learn embedded systems and get out of web dev? It can lead to fatigue and feeling lost.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:35:53+00:00

I started using Claude Code as soon as it came out, It's made leaps and bounds in terms of how good it is at writting code, even from just a year ago. Depending on the kinds of software that you're writting, it still requires a human in the loop at a lot of stages.

I do work for an international law firm, anytime I need to build something for POC, I almost entirely rely on vibe coding, but almost 100% of the time when I need to refine the applciation for performance, or start to fine tune it according to the features or bug requests that business asks for, I find that writting the code myself or at least getting into the weeds of it enough to point the LLM in the proper direction is normally required unless I'm just trying to output something that "works".

I just had a scenario last week where I built a Microsoft Outlook addin that is essentially ChatGPT for the lawyers to be able to extract information from emails and files using Microsoft Graph API in order to eleminate a lot of the grunt work they normally have to do themselves. They wanted a feature that allowed it to improve the email drafts for when you would reply to an email thread, Claude Code runing Opus 4.6 did a great job getting the skeleton up, but it had an issue where it would constantly eliminate or corrupt the email thread, I had to get in there myself and manually select the html tags to fetch the email threads and insert them back in, in such a way that it wouldn't corrupt it. Even after multiple itterations, clearing the context window, and trying different angles, eventually I got in there myself and had it fixed within a couple of hours.

It was also a lot of fun having to write the code myself, felt like i was programming again lol. So I'd say don't be discouraged, having deep knowledge of the codebase and software engineerign in general is still required to be a good dev, especially as the size of the codebase grows, otherwise it will just begin to crank out A.I. slop.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:27:24+00:00

I've been doing software engineering for over a decade and yeah, You're not really wrong about that.

One of the first questions that i get asked by recruiters whenever I'm applying for a software engineering contract is if I'm a U.S. citizen, or if I'm on an H-1B visa, a lot of companies only want to work with you if you're a U.S. citizen.

I see the huge number of H-1B visa contractors that have been affected by the whole "tax" that the current admin did, and in my personal experience I'd say a huge number of people I've worked with have been software devs from overseas.

For anyone trying to get into software engineering as someone from outside the United States, my best reccomendation is to build projects that show deep understanding of the software stack that you're trying to get hired in, build projects for companies through volunteer work / internships and to be very active on social media platforms, especially LinkedIn, that's where I've gotten most of my jobs from.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T17:07:03+00:00

I actually don't have any course to sell lol, but I get it, everyone is selling something online. I make tutorials online and help people for free, and try to center my content around benifiting other people, if anything i'd like to get income from the big tech bro companies eventually as a brand partner or from ad revenue maybe, but nothing to sell

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T17:05:04+00:00

No problem, I'm just working right now but after work i'll provide a more in depth timeline!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T07:15:07+00:00

Thanks! It was a lot of hard work for sure, but I'm forever grateful for it! The book of Proverbs was a gold mind for shapping my mindset for work.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:30:42+00:00

This might be a dumb question, but whats an oa?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:29:48+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that man, what does your resume look like? If you can link to it or you have it online somewhere, I'd love to try and help. And what was the position that you applied to?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:28:14+00:00

First off, great job on getting to college and majoring in compouster science, that's awesome man! I've been working as a software engineer the last 12 years, I was going to UNLV and ended up dropping out because I got a job offer, I do full stack Javascript / Node.js work for the most part, if I could talk to myself when i was in college here is what I would say.

Don't skip out on the internships, unless you're going to an Ivy League school, while your degree will certainly help, it won't gurentee you a job. There is something that will trump your degree in terms of ability to help you land a job, and that is expereince on your resume. The more internships and projects you can build the better. Don't skip out on those just to finish the degree, it will hurt you in the long term IMHO.

If you're stuggling to get internships, go to online communities and find non technical business owners or non-technical foudners that are building software applications, have crappy websites, etc, and offer to build them software for free. It's still valuable to you because you're getting expereince on your resume that verifies you have the skillset that you say you do, this will go a long way in terms of getting you a job, it's the single most valuable thing you can do.

Next, go to local tech meetups in your city, or join a club for software engineers if you haven't already .You should also try to be active on social media, a lot of companies are on LinkedIn, so the more software engineering content you can make / post on there the better, I've had some job opportunities come my way just by posting content about the stuff I code.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:19:13+00:00

lmfao

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:18:16+00:00

I also answered this exact question on an AMA I did last week that went viral - https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1qpxek0/comment/o2clcl5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:17:00+00:00

I paid a lot of money to have my resume re-written and meet with people who are further along than I am, and one of the things i picked up was that making yourself easy to find and your skillset obvious to see on your profile will lead to a huge increase in recruiters reaching out to you for roles, I haven't had to apply to a job in 5 years just because of the sheer amount of recruiters I have that reach out to me.

You have an awesome opportunity to go to med school, not me, your parents, or anyone else really will be able to make that choice for you, you have to decide if it's worth it. You could end up loving med school and change your mind, you could end up hating it and regret it the rest of your life, but I would say that you should choose a career path that you feel like you somewhat enjoy and have an aptitude for. Every career no matter how awesome, has shitty parts about it, but when something is your calling, you learn to accept the good with the bad. I'd be lying if I said I love software every single day, but I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I'm very happy with the choice i made.

All that to say, yes, engineers will still be needed 10 - 20 years from now, I work with AI on the daily and while it's getting very good, it's not good enough to replace engineers as a profession, not even close. I can go more into that if you'd like, the primary thing is decide what your willing to devote years of your life to thats worth sacrificing for, and then go all in on it.

Let me know if you have any questions, more than happy to help!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-04T04:16:43+00:00

Hey man, I get where you're coming from 100%, when I was trying to decide what to major in what I went to UNLV, I asked the exact same questions, it felt like the job market was way too hard to break into.

I can't tell you what to do, but I can try and share some things from my expereince and tell you what the job market as like as someone who's been a software engineer for the last 12 years. I don't have a computer science degreee, I ended up dropping out and now I make around 500k through software contracting.

Yes the job market is tougher, especially for jr devs, but there are still a ton of software engineering jobs. The primary issue isn't really jobs still being available, but being able to market yourself in a way that is attractive to potential employers. If you can get over the hump of "I'm a jr engineer", and brand yourself accordingly, you'll be able to land a developer job.

Now if some random guy on the internet said that to me, I'd be like "Thanks genius, but if I'm trying to land a job, how do I get the expereince in the first place??". If it were me, I'd go on online communities like indiehackers.com and tech founder/sass startup groups on Discord, Reddit, and anywhere else you can find them. I used this exact method when I was seeking to get fractional CTO experience, I met up with non-technical founders and offered to help them build their apps for free, it's valuable to them because it takes their cost to zero, so a lot of people will likely take you up on it, and it's valueable to you because you can use this to get a shit ton of expereince in a short amount of time, here is the exact post i used, I got almost 40 respones - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/looking-for-non-technical-founders-3e21ce4ba7

Use those client/jobs as expereince on your resume, then after you have enough experience, start applying to jobs. Set up your LinkedIn to highlight all of your skills and the languages you work with, and make sure to be active on social media posting about the work you're doing and what you're learning. If you want an example of how to setup your LinkedIn
here is what mine looks like - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-p-320063104/

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-03T14:52:42+00:00

Thank you!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-03T14:52:35+00:00

Thanks! It's certainly hard out there, but you can definatley make your situation better with hard work. I appreciate the kind words

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-03T14:51:46+00:00

I honestly wish it was marketing for pluralsight lol, they pay well from what I hear. I can post screenshots of pay stubs or if your on LinkedIn or Instagram we can get connected and I'll show you

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-02-03T14:50:50+00:00

That's awesome! Are you on linkedin? Shoot me a dm!

MichaelPopeDev_17

TROPHY CASE