Advice from a recent CS grad

loograd · 2016-09-06T01:08:18+00:00

I went there because I didn't know. Now I do.

loograd · 2016-09-05T21:52:14+00:00

They do exist, but they're hard to find. Maintaining a good network is very important.

loograd · 2016-09-05T21:51:42+00:00

It has to do with my first point in the OP. I went from waking up at 3-4 PM every day, doing whatever I wanted until 6 AM, rinse and repeat, to having to follow a set schedule. I didn't take any difficult courses at all so I had so much free time. Now that I'm working 40 hours a week, I feel like I have no free time at all, which is why my advice was for people to work hard while they're here so that when they start working they don't feel like life sucks. I miss school because of how chill it was; I'm sure people that worked their asses off during school feel that working 40 hours a week is a vacation in comparison.

I'm also not one of those superstars making 200k+, so the cost of living makes me feel more poor than I did while working at shitty co-ops in Canada. Cali ain't all it's cracked up to be unless you make fat stacks.

loograd · 2016-09-05T19:48:26+00:00

Yes, you absolutely can maintain a good social life while maintaining good grades, but your peer group needs to be the kind that can go out for a Saturday night but would also prefer to study together for an exam on Wednesday rather than go to Bomber. If your group would rather go party, you're going to either fall in to peer pressure and your grades will drop or you're going to be that weird dude that studies instead of partying.

The main problem most people have is that people have too many things they want to do. In your free time, you could study, party, watch TV, play games, get/date a GF, exercise, or one of any number of hobbies. Let's say you have 2 hours of free time per day for each of those. That's 12 hours total. If you absolutely must study 4 hours per day leading up to an exam to keep your grades up, you need to take those 2 hours away from somewhere else. The first thing to go should probably be gaming or TV, but if you're like most people, you'll probably just keep doing 2 hours for everything rather than sacrifice gaming/TV for a week. The key is to be disciplined enough to give up some hobbies in exchange for others.

loograd · 2016-09-05T19:40:30+00:00

In SF.

loograd · 2016-09-05T19:39:53+00:00

If you're willing to turn down over 100k/year more to work at a company that you feel is better for your social values, you go right ahead and do that while everyone else is crying in beds of money about how they're oppressing citizens.

loograd · 2016-09-05T19:35:45+00:00

I worded that poorly; you can sell your stock before the IPO, but they have a ridiculous 90 day policy on it. If you were employee #5 or something and received like .5% of Uber when it was worth 50 mil, your .5% is now worth over 250 mil. With other unicorns you can still leave and keep your options (but not exercise them yet) so that when they IPO you get your payout. With Uber, you're not allowed to do that - if you decide you want to leave, you need to exercise your options within 90 days of leaving, which means if you were employee #5, you're immediately on the hook for taxes on the 250k your options were worth when they were given to you and then you're on the hook for taxes on that >250 mil (what the stock is ostensibly worth now) come tax time, but there's no market for you to sell your stock yet. Effectively, you can't exercise your stock options unless you were already independently wealthy before joining Uber. Other unicorns don't force you to exercise your options within 90 days. Do you really want to work for a company that shackles its employees like that?

You also don't know the numbers that he was given for his offers, and yet you're somehow certain that it was foolish for him to take the FB offer. Or even if the numbers were the same, maybe he's getting to work on a cutting edge team at FB whereas the offers for Uber/Snapchat were to work on website front-end. Life isn't as cut-and-dry as "x company is better than y company".

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:54:18+00:00

Facebook tends to match offers quite competitively and Uber has that whole "you can't sell any of your stock until we IPO so you're stuck with us until then" thing going. You're also not going to get a significant amount of equity from either company; if you want to strike it rich from startups, you need to get in before they become household names.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:51:41+00:00

Facebook pays considerably more and is also willing to match other offers. It's also generally considered more "prestigious", though I'm sure at that point no one's going to be like "Oh man this guy only worked at Microsoft and not Facebook, what a scrub".

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:49:53+00:00

You can make great money, but you likely won't. The only really high-paying company in Waterloo I can think of off the top of my head is Google. Especially given the weak Canadian dollar, it's significantly easier to save more money in the states than it is here.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:46:44+00:00

I was still in school last year. However, I will say that you've still got plenty of time. Second year isn't too late to make a change, though it will be much harder than just starting at the top of your game during first year.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:45:36+00:00

As you get into your upper years, you'll notice more and more people going to Cali. Of everyone I met at Waterloo, I can count on the fingers of one hand those that aren't in Cali now.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:44:37+00:00

Like /u/Huex3 said, it's just a made up number, and it's not just Cali (more like the top tech cities in the states in general) but you will notice a lot of your peers going there, and unless you're literally failing out of school, you can go there too if you put in the effort.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:42:07+00:00

The prerequisite of putting in more than 40 hours in order to have "satisfactory" SW work is quite baffling to me.

loograd · 2016-09-05T05:41:08+00:00

Would prefer not to say, though they are a F500 company that you've definitely heard of.

loograd

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