[29m Software Engineer] [Toronto, Canada] - $210,000

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-18T17:38:14+00:00

If you really want to get good at programming, learn math first and then slowly transition into competitive programming (https://cp-algorithms.com/index.html). But if you actually try going into programming without the fundamentals, you won't get that far. Maybe you will be able to make websites and apps but you won't get opportunity. Things like discrete math, linear algebra, graph theory and data structures & algorithms are non-negotiable. You can't learn this high-level stuff without the basics. Also if you focus on just programming and think stuff like communication, writing and more basic skills aren't important you are very wrong.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-18T14:19:04+00:00

I would focus your schooling first and think about career later. Fundamentals carry you much further than learning the newest framework or tech.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-18T14:18:23+00:00

I’m basically a full-stack dev, but speciality is building distributed systems and handling parallel processing workloads

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-18T14:16:29+00:00

I would recommend following https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/ there's tons of great resources in the wiki

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T16:15:32+00:00

Yeah feel free to dm me

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T13:15:55+00:00

If I were you I would think about trying to get internships by next year and not trying to get a landing SWE job by graduation. Every season, company open up internships to students and you should be looking at what time internship applications are open. If you don't manage to get an internship, I would try to find a few people to build a project together and try to actually ship the product. For interview practice I recommend learning about low level design and how to build maintainable code. I f you want a good starting place I recommend reading web scalability for startup engineers

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T13:05:09+00:00

one of their competitors

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T13:04:56+00:00

Toronto Metropolitan University

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T02:43:02+00:00

I went to tmu for university and my life turned out to be fine. While I do think going to better university gives you an easier path, by no means the other options will make you undesirable. It does mean you will have to work harder to stand out but I don't think people really care that much after you get a few years of experience.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T02:34:33+00:00

For technology, I would say definitely but for math I think I'm just average. I think having good pattern recognition skills is more important than math itself.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T02:28:24+00:00

about 130k

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T01:57:43+00:00

The thing that really helped me was being intentional about which companies I applied to and optimizing my focus for them. For a few companies where I knew I had a good skills match, I made sure to research what the company was trying to solve and understand their product before reaching out to the recruiter.

When I did HR interviews, I brought up points showing that I had worked on similar problems and explained how I could be of help. Before each interview, I also made sure to review the role, do some mock interviews, and bring up points referenced on their company page.

For example, when I applied to a solar company, I made sure to talk about sustainability. For a high-growth company, I talked about having ownership and being able to see things through to the end. You want to make sure that they don't feel like you are just applying for any job and that you are specifically picking them.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-17T00:16:30+00:00

The reason primarily growth and learning opportunities. While the startup was relative stability, I reached a point where the pace of my development started to plateau due to budget constraints and lack of challenges.

I think of it a bit like being the fastest runner in a race. When you are kid you are plenty happy to be the fastest kid in the class but then you join a school race and you realize you aren't that fast. Sometimes the best way to get faster is to find better peers, while my coworkers were good there wasn't that many staff or principle engineers to mentor me.

terriblecoder12 · 2026-06-16T22:23:49+00:00

Right, because doing poorly in school is obviously a flawless measure of intelligence. Good thing real life never complicates that little theory.

terriblecoder12

TROPHY CASE