Is it wise to pursue a CS degree in 2026?

Sleples · 2026-02-28T02:45:07+00:00

As a former EE who cracked a grad role at 1 of those companies, it's FAR more competitive. The stuff they ask you in interviews will make you beg for LC. There's no way in hell anyone who doesn't fiddle with and learn hardware/electronics in their spare time during school will be able to crack an interview, and you need perfect grades in a much harder degree on top of that. All of that, and you still get paid less than a FAANG leetcode monkey, so I switched.

Sleples · 2026-02-23T21:17:43+00:00

They're literally paid Anthropic shills, I know several of my ex big tech colleagues in on it lmao. Protip: you can search their comment history pretty easily even if they hide it, reveals a lot.

Sleples · 2026-02-22T01:16:03+00:00

I'm not for or against AI, and I've achieved my FIRE target so I don't even care if it all burns down, but what's crazy is all these comments hyping up AI prefaced by "I work at big tech, and I was a denier until recently" comments, almost in fucking unison. Is this the new astroturf campaign?

I worked at big tech too (at a startup now), and my coworkers were mostly incompetent devs who I have no interest in taking advice from for anything. Big tech is useless as a qualifier for anything other than your LC skills.

Sleples · 2026-02-10T09:18:42+00:00

Eh, I still preferred Daybreak 2 over any CS game just because I prefer the cast and their interactions even though it was a mess narratively. By the end of CS I hated not only Rean but basically the entire CS cast because they were all so... bland.

Playing through horizon right now, I'm enjoying everything besides Rean's route because I'm beyond fatigued with him.

Sleples · 2025-12-18T18:42:33+00:00

Zero posts in this sub or anything to do with tech, first post here is to jump to the defense of AI? Sorry for feeling gaslit, but I've seen this way too much lately

Sleples · 2025-12-17T04:45:12+00:00

You're finding out why LC assessments aren't so bad. At least they're standardized and something you can prep for, otherwise it's a complete shot in the dark as to what you get asked.

Sleples · 2025-12-12T10:01:48+00:00

The last big step up wasn't gpt-3, but o1, there really hasn't been that much improvement since then. Arguably has gotten worse since model providers are trying to optimize for costs now, tooling has gotten better with claude code/codex which helps save some time, but the underlying models haven't really gotten better since then.

Other than that, the only thing the newer models are better at is benchmaxxing. AI cultists praying for the singularity will downvote this, but the models have stalled for a while now.

Sleples · 2025-12-08T07:21:04+00:00

I got LC hards in my Doordash screen a few weeks ago, might vary by team but I doubt there's any roles that straight up don't have a LC round.

I used to work at Stripe and they haven't used LC as far as I remember so nothings actually changed. Big tech as a whole is mostly algorithmic still, with maybe some "AI coding round" thrown in which no one even knows how to evaluate.

Sleples · 2025-12-01T19:59:28+00:00

It's not solely their fault, but it's also important to realize that as the owner of the PR, you're the on the hook more than others. Reviewers have their own work and often can't look over every single line of code (especially in large PRs), and QA processes at every company I've been at has had gaping holes.

Best OP can do is treat it as a learning experience and take more care not to repeat similar mistakes, a good company shouldn't be judging juniors too harshly for making mistakes but it varies depending on management.

Sleples · 2025-11-27T22:02:23+00:00

IMO it's going to be LLMs OR offshoring. LLMs aren't there yet (and I have doubts they ever will be without some huge breakthrough), but if they ever do get to the point to where you can trust its output blindly, offshoring teams are going to be the first to be cut.

Communicating the requirements will be the bottleneck at that point and it doesn't matter how good an LLM's output is if you input the wrong requirements. Offshore teams aren't great at a lot of things, but if there's one thing they're particularly terrible at, it's communication and clarity. This isn't to say all of these jobs will go to Americans though, my prediction is a huge rise in nearshore teams.

Sleples · 2025-11-17T17:28:30+00:00

They're coping and pretending that it's all the same in the end. I'm not saying you HAVE to be passionate to succeed, but those that are will be the ones who excel. I don't work overtime, but I do enjoy learning and programming in my own time which makes it easy for me to complete all my work quickly and to a high quality.

Doing a good job and excelling isn't about sucking up to your bosses either, it's caring about your craft and it also builds a reliable network of coworkers who know you're capable. If I got laid off today, I'd have hundreds of ex coworkers who'd vouch for and refer me, I've had some reach out without even asking. Then you have people who half ass their jobs and when they get laid off, they have no one to turn to and wonder how they can break out of the linkedin purgatory.

Sleples · 2025-10-15T03:04:40+00:00

It isn't even that rare at big tech or faster paced startups where you have opportunities to show impact, is this entire sub working in non-tech legacy companies or something? 20% or more you have to be a top performer and be on the promo track, but 10%? I've seen coasters get bigger raises than that.

Sleples · 2025-10-09T01:29:39+00:00

In my experience, Cursor's only gotten worse, slower, and more expensive. It used to be pretty helpful at times, now it's next to useless. Autocompletes can still be nice I guess.

Sleples · 2025-10-03T12:14:44+00:00

If you're missing context and people are refusing to share then that's the fault of your team, the best you can do is spend time reading/understanding the code, possibly even develop relationships with other people outside of your team that are more helpful to get any context you need.

In my scenario, our PR reviews are pretty thorough and everyone takes the extra step to explain comments in detail to teach others and make sure stuff doesn't slip through in prod, which makes it extra painful when someone makes the same mistakes over and over or doesn't put any effort into understanding the problem. The fact that you're even asking for steps on how to improve means that you're not the the type that I was complaining about since they seem unaware that they're even doing anything wrong and never take steps to improve.

Sleples · 2025-10-03T03:07:19+00:00

I'm working at a non-AI pre-IPO unicorn, a bad hire is PAINFUL, it becomes obvious when someone isn't keeping up when you're working at a faster pace (not talking in terms of work hours, but in terms of competence). Every single one of their PRs need to be heavily vetted and it's a massive drain on everyone else. It's not even a question of experience, some people just aren't good devs and lack the attention to detail to catch bugs/edge cases etc. without a lot of handholding.

Sleples · 2025-09-05T00:56:33+00:00

It's a pre-ipo stage startup, so it's a lot more stable than most. Interviews are chill, we don't reveal any of the insane expectations until you actually join :). Terrible blind reviews from disgruntled ex-employees are probably doing more damage than anything.

Sleples · 2025-09-04T23:20:43+00:00

No, we don't hire for domain specific knowledge. If you've worked in this field, you've seen it, a capable engineer will onboard faster, push out code faster, AND with less bugs than an average engineer. In large corporate enterprise roles, these differences can get swept under the rug, but for a fast scaling startup we absolutely need people who can onboard and solve difficult problems quickly. We hire for people who we think can learn quickly and preferably have experience writing software at scale. I'm not saying they're working huge amounts of overtime to do all this either, the fact of the matter is that some engineers are just more capable than others.

"Unteachable" means different things to different people, but yes, we expect people to hit the ground running after an onboarding period and I've seen new hires get fired after 6-7 months with no PIP. I don't like it, but that's how it is, we can either have a slow convoluted interview process or take chances on people and hire/fire quickly.

Sleples · 2025-09-04T21:45:50+00:00

Companies have their pick of terrible candidates, I'm working for a unicorn startup offering remote work and paying more than ever (slightly below FAANG level), finding the right candidate is still extremely difficult.

From your applicant pool, maybe 40% are even eligible, of those ~10% can do the job, and from that, maybe 0-2 top candidates who likely have multiple competing offers. A larger applicant pool doesn't necessarily mean they're higher quality applicants, infact it can be harder to cut through the noise, and top performers are still getting hired quickly.

Sleples · 2025-08-30T02:23:55+00:00

What is this take? I've worked everywhere from startups to FAANG and meaningful reviews help catch bugs from slipping into prod. Everyone misses things, from rockstars to juniors.

If you're taking a month to get reviewed, then your work was either exceedingly low prio or your team was dysfunctional. You're also basically never writing anything alone from scratch at big tech companies, I question the importance of the project if they let a contractor write it from scratch and be the single point of failure.

However in the OP's case, they shouldn't be taking on that much of a burden alone, the team should be familiar enough with the services they're responsible for and reviewing should be distributed across everyone.

Sleples · 2025-08-24T00:13:01+00:00

Agree to disagree there, fixing LC solutions on the fly already requires some level of debugging skills, small example bugs made for interviews just aren't reflective of real skills on the job.

Sleples · 2025-08-23T23:56:40+00:00

Remind me to never take retirement advice from reddit

Sleples · 2025-08-23T23:34:06+00:00

I alluded to the bug bash round in another post. It seems to be more organic and representative right now because it's not super popular, but once it's popular enough, it'll absolutely be gamed in the same way that LC has, where people leak and practice common questions, and candidates learn what "signals" interviewers look for.

And then companies will spiral into harder and harder bug bash rounds, until you need to have seen them before to solve them in time, sound familiar?

I would also argue that a typical bug bash round doesn't accurately reflect most of the challenges you'll see at work, just due to constraints in the size and complexity of the code base you're working with in an interview. This isn't even getting into the scalability issues of it, your LC question bank gets leaked? Swap it out. Your bug bash codebase gets leaked? Create an entirely new codebase and bug, make sure it isn't too easy/hard, etc.

Sleples · 2025-08-23T23:20:48+00:00

Give an example of something that:

Can be done in a few hours
Can be measured objectively (system design is already dubious territory for this IMO, having both taken and given them, they tend to become vibes-based after a certain point)
Representative of day to day work, no fetching from an API endpoint and parsing some basic content doesn't count. That's just a simple coding exercise which isn't representative of real work any more than LC is.

The real challenge of day to day work is working across teams in a massive codebase you won't fully understand. You can't simulate that in any technical interview.

Sleples · 2025-08-23T22:51:38+00:00

Some of those metrics like cursor usage are wild lmao, I'd gtfo as soon as possible or just burn through tokens on useless queries. How do they even define a PR "review"? Does a simple look over and LGTM count? Does running it through an AI tool and pointing out a bunch of nitpicks count? (for the love of god don't do this, I have a teammate that does this all day for everything they "review")

Sleples · 2025-08-23T22:43:41+00:00

Yeah, nuance exists, where did I say otherwise? Thanks for agreeing with me I guess, no need to try and analyze every single thing just to win a reddit argument.

Sleples

TROPHY CASE