When I was a student, I remember being told, at every stage, "Just wait 'til you get to -- things will be so much harder," and it was sometimes (but rarely) true.
Then when I was a teacher, I saw it even more as the farce that it is.
Some jobs are very hard. Being a software developer, even, can be very hard. I have days where the work is extremely challenging, but (especially in my current job) it's almost never emotionally taxing. It's just "here's a hard problem and we'll work on it together until it's done."
But most problems are relatively straightforward.
The second hardest problems I've had to work on have been people, process, and communication problems. Most of the time, if those things are relatively sorted, the technical stuff is pretty fine.
The hardest problems I've worked on are when folks try to build technical solutions to what are ultimately internal people, process, or communication problems instead of going to talk to each other. Untangling petty power squabbles is annoying, and even more so when the effects of those weird struggles permeate the entire codebase.
Man, I'm a couple months into my first dev job and on a very busy team and it feels way more emotionally taxing than school ever did. School could be hard, and there were deadlines, but I always felt like I could figure it out and get it done. And if I didn't, or if I did something wrong, I'd only be letting myself down.
I feel mentally drained a lot of days after work and it's living rent free in my head even when I'm off the clock.Maybe this is more a symptom of my current role and team where I'm doing way more support than project work and there is a sense of urgency from the business end (although how genuine that urgency is it's sometimes hard to tell). Or maybe it's just part of being new.
I'm 10 years into my career and pressure at companies can be excessive. My company is probably trying to IPO so it doesn't give a fuck about the work it's generating for it's workforce right now. We are all crushed.
Right there with ya… I joined my current company at a weird inflection point where the amount of work was starting to roll over itself like a wave, and the engineers were trying their damndest to stay afloat. It’s gotten better in the few months since I joined, but there is still always work that needs to be done and it almost always bleeds over into my off days.
Both, unfortunately. I’m not expected to work on my off days, but in order to stay on top of my workload it requires an hour or two on weekend mornings occasionally. I don’t mean to say my company is horrible or anything, the managers are all very aware of the heavy workload and are actively working to bring it down.
Believe me, I understand the sentiment! I promise this isn’t a situation like that though. The company was very honest with me about the workload and challenges, and I chose to work there anyway because the work directly impacts something I care about (I work in health tech/used to work in hospital direct care).
It’s kind of like being a super-villain with a bunch of henchmen; you get kind of a win-win situation, because either you win and take over the world and can afford to pay them all, or you lose and probably all your henchmen will have been murdered by erstwhile heroes, so you won’t have to worry too much about all the debt you accrued while trying to pay them on credit.
Coming from a sr dev, that's not good. Are you getting stuck and not asking for help, which then adds more pressure, or is it the culture? Are things not known before they get to you so you don't have much direction?
I end up that stressed, but it's because I see a mess around me, but I'd hope my younger devs don't feel that way.
>Are you getting stuck and not asking for help, which then adds more pressure, or is it the culture? Are things not known before they get to you so you don't have much direction?
I think it's often more the latter. I definitely prefer to research and figure things out on my own if I can, but I'm not afraid to ask questions, and frankly I feel like I have too much to do to waste hours trying to figure out how to do one thing. All the other developers on my team have been very helpful and friendly when I reach out, so no complaints there.
We don't have a senior dev on my team though. The only one left shortly after I started. We've got 4 mid levels and 4 juniors. And the vast majority of the codebase was written by people who are no longer with the company.
Also the way out sprints our planned and structured kind of stresses me out. Our sprints are 9 days long and we have to plan for 7 hours a day. So that leaves us 63 hours. When planning, we set aside 13 hours for support work (even though there is more support work than that comes in each sprint than can be fit into 13 x 8 (the number of developers on the team) hours) but then we plan for the other 50. I don't know if this is how must companies do it, but I feel like this leaves me almost no wiggle for people reaching out to me with questions, or unplanned meetings or spending extra time going over stuff with people, even just tagging along when a more experienced dev is working on something I might benefit from learning about.
Maybe part of it is just me and placing overly high expectations on myself though. No has given me any negative feedback. I guess if I had to describe it the culture seems frantic and a little overwhelming, but the people are nice. I have no real basis for comparison when it comes to dev teams though.
Sprint Capacity vs Hours Worked is a scrum tale as old as time. I personally hate counting hours because you run into the issue you're describing, which is overloading your developers because the hours seems to 'fit' but will cause frustration in the short run and burn out in the long run. I perfer to run off of 'story points' rather than hours, which equates to a range of hours rather than miniute to minute totals. I have a few questions for you, and some of your answers might help how you can talk with your manager about your concerns.
**Sprint Work/Sprint Estimates**
\-How accurate are the estimates placed before you? Do you feel you always 'meet' them? Or are you catching up on some, failing at others so it 'shakes out in the end'. Do you typically have rollover from sprint to sprint?
\-Do you feel you can safety push back on estimates to add padding to allow for the intangible drop in work (quick unplanned meetings, questions from colleagues, etc)?
\-Are you able to select your stories to work on in a sprint in order to have a balance of 'quick wins' vs 'interesting/complex problems'?
**Support Work**
\-How much of a fire drill is your support work? Is this trying to get people/products back up? Or is it working on backlog issues?
Support should work as such with on-calls only focusing on Critical's and maybe Highs during the sprint, but documenting the Mediums/Lows:
* Critical (People are down, and should get them up within the next 2-4 hours)
* High (Support volume is ratcheting up, but a work around exists, should be taken care of within the week)
* Medium (bug/issue is backlogged and looked at in the next sprint)
* Low (bug/issue is backlogged and scheduled when time is available.)
Most companies will have one person that's "on-call" that all the questions get directed to. This position rotates weekly and they get a reduced workload while on call. You post somewhere who is on call that week, and forward them any questions.
What I've learned to do it have two backlogs, small bugs + annoyances, and the product backlog. When you on call, you pull from the bugs. This allows the team to work on tech debt and someone is there to help other people.
Also, it's 6 hours a day for work, on an 8 hour schedule. This gives you time for scrum ceremonies (1hr) and bathroom + ramping up / down. Have you told your manager you feel this way? They probably don't want to burn you out given the market for devs.
I ended up blending part time delivery gig (for cooling off mentally and moving, seeing people) with part time small projects on my own, so I could decide the features, pacing etc It was a good balance.
I actually find the notion of the next level being harder quite interesting.
It's definitely true on so many levels. At least until you become an independent adult generally the level of responsibility and risk of failing increases.
In early education you are pretty much guaranteed to get to the next grade regardless of what you. At the same time there are many people dropping out of college and losing their jobs.
I think this is a big part of what drives teachers to talk about the next level being harder.
On the other hand the further you go the more freedom you have in what you do and what your goals are. Especially when you inherited some wealth and your skills are well paid you can probably coast with ease similar to early levels.
I think this is another factor driving teachers to talk about the next level being harder. Teaching is a hard job that isn't paid very well. Hence for teachers the terminal level might very well be the hardest.
there are a lot of people who would bluff you *things will be so much harder**
but i realize cs is just math. when you dunno the solution, everything is very hard. once you know the solution, the problem is trivial.
I wish CS was just like math. But it's not. Sometimes (can be a lot depending on the job) it's trying to decipher poorly documented code that doesn't follow your personal logic or best practices.
And once you know a solution, it doesn’t mean its applicable everywhere else. Especially when you’re dealing with unknown architectures you didn’t write.
Sure, solving known math equations is trivial, but new ones you or other’s don’t know the solutions to aren’t.
If I’m writing everything from scratch, my way, on my own, things are definitely much easier (albeit longer). But it doesn’t necessarily work that way.
Actual “computer science” is lots of math. But the vast majority of programmers/developers are designers or engineers, not mathematicians.
In engineering, there isn’t “one true solution”, but rather a number of ways to solve a problem, each with it’s own costs, compromises, etc.
The hardest part is that shit ultimately rolls downhill to us. When anyone adjacent to us doesn't do their job properly we ultimately have to solve the problem. If you have a skilled developer that doesn't speak up it can make a whole lot of incompetent people around them look competent.
Said in another way, once you know your domain the rest is all the same as any other office job. It's almost always people problems: effective communication, team-building, organizing effort, free bagels in the break room, etc
School has this vibe of, "You have to succeed otherwise we'll kick you out." Work will also kick you out if you fail too much, but first they're going to put in a ton of effort to make you successful, such as having available teammates help you, have managers do coaching with you, and generally having to deal with the paperwork that comes with firing someone. The company invested time and money on hiring you, they want to make sure their energy expenditure was worth it. School is "you failed too many classes bye"
I mean it still can be. I still love working on side projects and recently, game dev. Rarely is programming the actual stressful part of my job. When I'm building what I want I don't have to worry about getting my tickets knocked out, reporting to management, sitting through meetings, etc. I just get to do the fun part of the job.
Honestly, it's become even more fun since I've been a professional dev, because my work has really improved my overall skills and being able to apply those skills into my hobbies. Where I'm currently at, my side projects have gone from month long ventures, to some fun things that I build on a weekend.
>The knowledge that 'this might be all life is' is worse.
Yeah, it's weird seeing this unfold especially once you're say 1-2 years into your first job. You're 25, you're making good money, you can buy basically all the middle-upper class luxuries you like and it's like: congrats you have a stable existence now what do you want?
Many of us get here by just continually making incremental "right" choices without any grand considerations of our life arc. I guess this is the idea of the "quarter-life crisis".
Better to have these thoughts earlier rather than later tbh.
I said it in my own comment but yeah the fact that so much of school was outside the classroom was a huge challenge for me personally.
The fact that I can keep my work in the (virtual remote) office and not worry about it once I log out for the day is a big relief compared to showing up for an hour and a half to be told I'll need to do several hours of reading to be ready for next week.
I personally found my work to be much easier. Here's why:
* I'm not expected to memorize things.
* I'm not expected to know everything right off the bat.
* I'm given sufficient time and am able to give estimates for tasks.
* I can negotiate deadlines or move them sometimes.
* I get paid for the work I do.
* I can walk away from work and do literally anything else but work.
* My coworkers are friendly and want me to succeed.
* My work is collaborative.
* I can work at my own pace.
Of course, the work I do is actually significantly more difficult than school. But the environment really helps alleviate that pain.
One other thing to mention is that in school you're often working on 4-5 discrete topics at any given time. Even if they're in the same domain (i.e. CS/your major) they can be wildly different mental workloads so you're constantly switching not only the context of a course but also the processes of each professor: expected work, tests, papers, etc.
In the real world you're unlikely to work on more than 2-3 things at time, the work itself is fairly consistent in its execution or domain, and if you do more it's generally in an oversight position where details are less important.
For me right now, I feel like learning is the most exhausting not that the problems are that hard per se but the constant battle with trying to understand foreign concepts instead of applying you knowledge to work out new things.
Now yes doing it that way will get better results but makes it imo harder
> I'm not expected to memorize things.
memorization exams in the academic settings is the most stupid thing i have ever come across in life. this damn thing causes me life-long troubles.
My sons pediatrician flat out walked out of the room, googled something we asked, came back, and told us he googled it and this was what google said. It was some food safety thing, I can't remember the specifics, but it really made me laugh how much we rely on Google in all professions.
If you ask questions outside thr doctors specialty he is likely only slightly better than avarage layman.
The thing that has an edge is that the doctor would use a different google keyword and can filter trash results
Sure, but some stuff they don't. Like they gotta know the body, just in case something happens while cutting you up they gotta know what. They don't have time to Google
I think its fundamentally easier to be given a problem with somewhat flexible parameters and then be given freedom to solve it in whatever way I think is best than to be given an unnecessarily rigid problem for which I am intended to converge on a single solution that was extrapolated from what was "taught" to me the week before at 8:30am.
Work being collaborative is huge. That and work is a dedicated 40 hours or so a week at your tasks. School requires context switching and figuring it out on your own. I would say that real world apps are quite more complex than a school project. But you are 1 engineer of many. So your scope can be more narrow. And if you get stuck, you have experienced teammates to lean on or hell even the internet. And time.
>the work I do is actually significantly more difficult than school.
actually this hasn't even been the case for me yet in my 2.5 years as a dev so far, my classes were very tough. granted I did go to a top 10 cs school
I remember talking about this to a friend of mine. Working at big tech companies is exactly like school without the bad parts. There is no homework, no quizzes, no finals. You get to solve problems and get paid. Some places like Google will even have free food. A big difference is that it’ll be slightly harder to make friends and find love interest at work compared to universities.
Except work is 40 hours a week. School you don't even have to go to class if you work it out right. I could get by doing less than 10 hours of work a week in school.
I prefer a set amount of work that you can complete in your own time. Maybe I should be a contractor.
It depends a lot on the specific school plus if you're a commuter or not. If you're a commuter, modern curriculums fucking *suck* for school-life balance.
* I'm a commuter student, 1 hour each way so off the bat I have 10 hours committed.
* Senior capstone course is 6 hours worth of class time + 10 hours worth of work on a project (tracked through Jira/Chronos).
* CS elective that has 2 hours worth of lectures I can't miss, plus about 6-8 hours a week on assignments
* gen-eds adding up to about 8 hours together
So assuming everything goes smoothly, I have to commit *at least* 32 hours just to school alone. That's not including how much time I have to spend actually working to afford expenses & tuition. And that's just for a Bachelor's too.
As a commuter I also basically can't have a decent routine or set schedule. I have to get up fairly early (for a college student) at 8-9, go home mid-day in the afternoon at 3-5pm tired from fighting traffic for an hour straight with my brain fried from lectures and meetings despite the fact its only mid-day, and still have about 4-6 hours worth of schoolwork I still have to complete that evening.
My day is essentially as if I was working a 9-5 at school and then going home and working from 6-10. The dumb part is I have to spend half the time at school sitting around because of 30 min - 1 hour blocks breaking up lecture times where there's no way I could be productive. It takes me a half hour just to fully context switch and get focused.
Its honestly exhausting, the hard hours completed doesn't amount to a lot but having to commute in the middle of what is essentially your "work day" is brutal. It just destroys any flow you have and you have to waste time context switching to get focused again when you get home. Plus my most productive hours are by far the mid-morning to afternoon and those are essentially always eaten up by commutes and lectures.
I have a remote job lined up after graduating and am grateful as **fuck** that I won't have to commute, like honest to god over the moon. I don't care that I'll technically be working more hours a day, at least they'd actually be more productive and in a singular block where I can definitely "shut off" after 5pm and not be constantly stressed about assignments.
This sounds like what I was dealing with. Commuting to school, paying for parking, commuting to work, having no time to do homework or any hobbies reliably. No time for self care.
That's why I dropped out, after losing my financial aid.
Don’t most people work through school? _Most_ semesters, school was less than 40 hours (there were like 2 exceptions), but it’s on top of working 40-50 hours a week. Going from that to only working 30-40 hours a week is a world of difference.
It's pretty common to work at least part time but I don't know a lot of people who worked full time through school. Honestly idk how people can manage that because I barely managed working part time while in school.
To answer your question frankly, I was super busy. I took 12-13 hours per semester (so just right on the line of full time) and worked my hours across multiple jobs that were quite flexible.
I would do one of them about 20-25 hours a week and that one was usually weekends early morning or night time (like 9pm-1am ish). My “main” job was at one point a part time warehouse job that I worked in the evening and took classes during the day, but once I started getting internships I started taking afternoon classes and working my internships part time and then continued my side job in the night/weekends.
My senior year I ended up getting a full time developer position that still gave a bit of flexibility and quit my side job. I would come in early every day so I could leave early 2 days a week for class and had to take some classes online.
It sounds worse than it was when I write it down. I admit I was quite busy and I had my free time split into hourly blocks on google calendar and would schedule/reschedule literally everything. From work, to individual assignments, to studying, and even to playing video games a few nights a week. I was tired of school by the end of it but it was still an enjoyable period of my life.
Oh hm maybe just a regional thing. I also don’t have any student loans so it came with its benefits lol. I did internships all year round which was helpful career wise too.
I think it depends from person to person, but school for me was extremely draining and took waaaaay more than 40 hours. You combine the 15 hours of courses, plus the commute, plus the homework, plus the waiting time between classes, plus the studying, plus the planning, plus attending extra-curricular stuff... all of sudden I'm looking at 60-70 hours of work each week.
I thought we were comparing work to school, not work to work + school? Of course work alone is better than working a worse job *and* going to school.
Edit: For the record, I did work through school except for my freshman year. Thanks for being an asshole, though.
I think it's worth exploring what you mean by *easy*.
I think the actual problems you solve in school are *easier*. This is generally because the problems have been curated so that getting to an answer is usually pretty formulaic, and there always **is** an answer.
However, I've found life to be *easier* because you can put in your hours and not worry about work once you leave. Contrast that with school when you always have stuff going on: projects, homework, upcoming tests, etc.
>and there always **is** an answer.
Wew, this hit.
I've spent so much time trying to solve some core problems that turn out to just be not solvable.
-----
One in particular is converting between various fiat currencies an arbitrary number of times without ever losing precision. -turns out you just can't... Most currencies base units are equivalent to the cent with hundredth place precision.
If you multiply and divide numbers with hundredth precision you may need more precision to get an exact value before rounding to the nearest hundredth.
Ex.
4.20 * 0.69 = 2.898
If you round now you have a .002 discrepancy, if you round later you need to store floats with potentially limitless precision.
Explaining this to the non-engineering stakeholders was a challenge.
Dude I’ve had so many managers think that I’m manipulating them because I use overly technical terminology to explain why I can’t get certain things done. One of them was like “Why can’t you just give me an estimation in plain English?” And I almost, ALMOST ripped him and said “Oh I’m sorry, I thought a product manager’s job was to understand the fucking product, like how the formats of the files I was sending back were XMLs—but I guess that’s just too fucking complicated for a retarded business major like y—“ but I held my breath and explained the reason as calmly as I could and insulted him behind his back to friends outside of my company instead.
Agreed, I'm surprised to hear that school seems to be difficult in other places. But then, I went to a run of the mill college in Latin America and now work at a FAANG.
My work is arguably more challenging than any exam and homework I was given in college, however, at 5pm I close my work MacBook and call it a day, no need to say that I'm often on reddit and casually game with some coworkers on work hours too.
Might be a Costa Rica thing. I know of schools in 2 other countries where school is hell. The degree is supposed to be 5 years long but it takes a lot of people 7
Could be a mix of our curriculums having barely any "filler classes", having semesters rather than quarters (the course material is more spread out), commuting, and well, going to an average college rather than to a top one. But yeah, college here is quite easy, it's common for everybody to have a part-time job, and most of my classmates also studied English on weekends.
A few more than the Blind-75 + the weekly contests. However, I preach here that you must learn the patterns and learn problem solving rather than attempting to memorize the problems and hoping to get the same one on the interview.
I find work easier because no one got the solution. I don’t have to guess what is expected, I just do my thing, I do it well, and if you have a better solution let me know and we’ll go your way. If I don’t know how to do something I research it, and solve it.
I don't think the printmaking I solved in school were easier. Me and my other SE friend were trying to help her daughter with her CS homework and we couldn't do it. It was such a nonsense assignment that had nothing to do with programming. She eventually figured it out on her own.
> but takes up so much more time.
This is going to vary by school and program. I don't think I ever had a free weekend in college, there was always work to do.
Exactly I dont know why I am seeing comments of people saying they only need <10 hours a week to keep up with school. At my uni you gotta be on the grind daily. Really burns out some people.
When I was in there I just got used to never feeling done or ahead of the curve. It was like a perpetual state of when you have so much to do and you're so far behind that you just admit defeat and take a nap.
School was multiple classes. Some of which weren't related. I had a job + lectures + homework so it was micromanaging different classes. Job is just job. You don't have to write an English paper due end of the week while simultaneously working on a project. Instead it's all your hours to your 1 job and if you don't finish, you checkout and get back at it the next day/week.
Damn, where did you go to college?
I spend about an hour a week on homework. I have a semi-decent GPA (3.3) and I have one more class to take until I graduate.
Bruh, an hour a week? I’ve had CLASSES that estimated 20 hours a week of studying/homework in order to do well. Obviously not all classes were like that, but still. This was at a top 5ish school.
A top 5 school. Problem sets were easily 5+ hours each, usually more if you did them by yourself instead of in a group. I mean just reading CLRS adds up quickly before you even try the problems.
One hour. _One hour?_
I have lab reports from weekly labs that take 8 hours to do if you want to do them right- and that's after I wrote a stupid amount of them, because at first they literally took me 12-18 hours.
Good for you that your college experience was so pleasantly easy, mine is a bloody grind.
It depends completely on your job. You, i'm guessing, went from college straight to your first job as a developer. You never had to work late nights in a factory, getting yourself and your clothes filthy and drained of all energy. You likely never even worked in a busy retail store, with managers hounding you to be productive.
I did those jobs before I became a developer, and trust me - it's the job that's easy, not working in general. There are even more miserable jobs out there.
I worked in hospitality for 10 years, 5 of them in middle-management. There's no way in hell being a developer is going to be more soul-crushing than that. I'm so pumped.
I come from pretty much the exact same background and have been employed as a software engineer for almost a year now, and I can say very confidently (at least from my own experience) that it is not even in the same ballpark. If you enjoy software even a little bit, I have a feeling it's going to be a night and day difference for you. It can be a little stressful getting started because of the learning curve but you get used to it, and depending on where you work it's genuinely *amazing* how much less taxing I've found this industry than that of restaurants/hospitality.
I know I haven't been doing it a long, but after a year I've gotten a pretty solid idea of what I like and what I don't like about doing this, and I have absolutely never been this happy with my job. Two years ago I probably wouldn't have ever expected to be where I am now, but now I can't imagine ever doing anything else.
As someone who worked in hospitality: it isn’t. And it’s interesting. And also yeah you might get shitty coworkers, but they are still more rational and pragmatic and intelligent and open to collaboration then the big majority of restaurant managers and customers. Ill never forget how I got fired from a restaurant for saying no to a short notice call because I had to go pickup my mother at an airport (and I had notified the manager weeks in advance). I never looked for a job again in hospitality after that
I worked in a group home. Had to learn to cook for others, cleaned adults’ dirty butts, had to calm down angry people with mental disabilities who would literally punch through a wall.
Seeing all these comments is giving me some relief. I’m currently doing my Master of Information Technology (Did a B.Sc in maths) and work a bit less than part time at the moment (my boss is quite flexible), and the work load honestly feels never ending. Beyond study, work, cooking, general life admin, and exercising, I barely find any time at all to engage my hobbies and interests, and when I do I am exhausted. I have worked full time in my holidays and the nice part about work is that it ends at 5. Uni never ends and I often find myself working late into the night for weeks on end. I’m really looking forward to having some cash, time, and not constantly having the cloud of homework/assignments over my head.
Idk about yall, I graduated in 2020, and in our final exam, we wrote fucking code on paper. I still remember getting marks off cuz I forgot one semicolon in the first year. Shits impossible. Why am I supposed to remember regex expressions? Why am I supposed to remember every little minute detail? I have been working for 2 years or so now, 3.5 including internships, it's SO much easier than school. I think I am a pretty decent developer, but in school, my grades were complete asscheeks, because writing code on paper makes literally no sense.
Deadlines can suck and yeah as you already mentioned, interview prep and constant rejection is trash
Edit: however making 6 figures and overall having stable mental health isn’t much to complain about.
Recently transitioned from 50 hours of warehouse work and 20 hours of classes to tech. Holy shit it's great. 95% of my tasks are now fully automated. The other 5%, is fuel to fully automate and upskill in the process.
At school 99% of the assignments might be challenging. At work 99% of the work/assignments are doable/easy BUT THAT 1% will keep you up all night scratching your head. I think the most challenging thing is having solid requirements or getting people to agree on something.
What about the comments here that say they close their work at about 5pm and forget about it till the next morning? Can I expect that as common or does it only depend on the company?
By 11 AM I'm usually done. After lunch might have 30 minutes BS meeting then that's it. This happens once the project is mature enough and going through the maintenance phase. But there were days when I was working till 11PM ! It all depends on the project and the team.
I haven't started working yet but all my friends who graduated from CS programs and have been working tell me that it's so much easier than when they were in school.
The reason they give is usually along the lines that when you're working you're usually honed in on a specific objective or project. That's not the case for school where you have to study your ass off for subjects that you couldn't care less about.
The same goes for graduate school. When I was doing my master's it was so much more pleasant than my undergrad.
I don't know. I have to work 8 hours a day, but when I was in school I could do everything in 2-3 hours and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends or just enjoying life.
I think that's sorta the idea - frontload a bunch of training and knowledge into a half decade of school and junior development so that when you're posed with the sort of hard problem needed to build cool stuff, you can solve it fairly easily.
IMO the work isn't meaningfully easier, and if it is harder it's not much harder, but you're much *much* smarter now.
It depends on the rigor of your degree program, other life events, and your personal approach to school. Many of my friends had extremely challenging academics *plus* Real Life Shit in their college years, with very limited social support. (Edit: Like, some commenters here had 2-3 hour days; a *normal* course load at my school was 50 hrs/week, not counting research, work, or extracurriculars.)
Personally, nothing at work can hold a candle to the challenge that was college. No matter what the work problem, I worked longer on harder problems with less sleep in college. And that's comforting.
We are unbelievably fortunate in this field for a multitude of reasons.
It's easier because we don't have to memorize a bunch of useless stuff and we can use Google if we forget somethings. Also getting paid a shit ton also helps.
School drains me like nothing else. The expectation and requirement to work all day every single day of the week on hw/projects/studying (especially subjects I didnt care for) and being graded for every little thing made school a shit experience and unbearable if it weren't for friends. I say this as a person whos has upkept a 4.0 gpa since elementary school through college, so my perception may be different than others of the education system.
For me, work life is harder but it has very little to do with work itself. It's the fact that I'm an adult now and I have to do adult stuff. School might have been a bit more draining and tedious but after I went home, I did fuck all.
I find it very difficult, for me personally. Maybe I snuck through the educational system on the coattails of my intelligent classmates. I'm struggling and can't get anywhere. I thought about it, and I've contributed absolutely nothing to any codebase anywhere. I think there's a reason for that. Currently looking for another job outside of the industry because I'm tired of letting people down and not producing anything.
I think work is a lot easier for me as well, and I graduated in 2021.
In school you always had so many things to stress about 24/7. I'm not saying work is easy but I only have to deal with it for 8 hours a day.
I mean yeah. In school I was working full time plus some side jobs on top of studying and now I’m working 1 job from home and not going to class. It’s impossible for that to not be easier lol
Is it really easier? I’m a student right now and it’s tough but I’m getting through it, but man sometimes I find myself overwhelmed and just burned out.
School is supposed to fill your head with everything you might possibly need to know to get any of dozens of jobs in your field.
Most jobs these days involve updating a spreadsheet without breaking it.
One of unpopular opinions here, but work is way more difficult than school.
Pair programming heavily everyday. Cannot work at my own pace. People watching over shoulder puts a lot of stress. Depending on the work, it's like trying to follow university lecture except you also have to constantly talk. It feels like I'm in tech interview everyday lol.
I mean I view school as a place to really develop your work ethic. It could seem easier just because you have spent many years developing good work ethics.
Depends on how rigorous your major is but yeah. Most jobs are menial, repetitive and easy. And you don't have to bring work home with you. School can be very mentally challenging and requires more time commitment, studying, and dedication. That being said, I'll take school over work because at least with school you are making an investment into yourself in the hopes of landing a great paying career. Many jobs are dead end paths that lead to nowhere, and the thought of doing the same task for years over and over is enough to make someone lose all hope. At least there is variety in the stuff you do in school and a sense of progression.
What do you mean easier?
Easier as in technical problem? No, it is harder.
More pleasant? Might be if you consider studying is hard (I am not, study is easy). And you might work responsibilities is more pressure.
Depends on the day, but on average my professors were much, much more strict than any job I’ve ever had. I’ve had situations where my senior developer friends commented on how absurdly difficult my assignments were.
There's too much variation here to say for sure. There's a big range of difficulties/workloads for school (from, say, your local commuter school to the Ivies). And a big range of difficulties/workloads for jobs. For example, I went to a school somewhere in the middle, which I found to be easy and relaxed, but I've chased compensation and ended up at the high end for work, so work is a lot harder than school was. But I'm sure it would be a lot closer if I'd gone to Stanford or something, or if I'd stayed at my first job (which was similar to or easier than school).
Ultimately it's all highly contingent upon the workplace you're in and the school you're coming from.
I work in a large investment bank and I definitely think the day-to-day grind is less stressful and more rewarding than in university. If I were working on a different team (same employer) that'd be a different calculation, some teams are basically on-call 24/7 and constantly dealing with scaling problems etc.
And not all universities / colleges are the same. Some have very lax standards and low expectations. Some you can cruise and others have such demanding, complex coursework it's worse than a full-time job.
So yeah, get past the interview stages and into the right job and it'll be more chill than university. You'll make reasonable money too if you work hard and are adaptable.
This is a pretty good career path all things considered. The "it'll be much more stressful once you're in the workplace" meme doesn't always hold. It's very contingent on where you go to work.
You got a good thing going, never join Amazon :p
I also feel work life is easier than school. It's more like this -
school on paper, prepares you for the entire spectrum of the field - from pure science to engineering. It's just we picked engineering (which happens to be the most paid and in-demand field also) so maybe it's easier for us. I'm sure the professors you mentioned or people working on really critical projects may have it hard.
Also, I feel technical problems don't make your life hard as nearly as dealing with people - this includes pressure from your manager, meeting deadlines, toxic work culture, process complexities and all. Rarely do people quit jobs because the technical stuff was too challenging, that I can say for sure is tougher at school with the assignments and a student's general lack of knowledge and experience. Technical stuff can get complex very fast in big companies also though, which can get extremely difficult to solve as well (I've only heard war stories and not experienced problems at that level yet though).
But I also prefer it this way, athletes and the military usually train for scenarios way tougher than 90% actual ones, so should engineers no?
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Question on this topic: right now we're studying using python to send automated emails.
Is this something I'm honestly going to be expected to know in a typical SE job? Because it's boring as hell and feels ridiculous.
I had a massive anxiety disorder in school (still do, honestly) and I was always terrified that if I couldn't get myself to school when I'm a child and being taken care of, how would I ever have a job without missing loads of time and getting fired? Turns out, Jobs are wayyyyy easier than school ever was and the fact you get some autonomy for things like breaks, lunches, what work you do when (to some extent) makes it much less daunting of a thing.
My worst days at work have been better than my best days at school. I felt very much alone in school. Assignment didn't work, TA doesn't help much, get a 0. Can't get something at work, whole team works on it together until it's solved.
yes for sure. I remember when I got my first job I thought: that's easier than uni projects, and it even pays me money? Enough money to live in an expensive city like a grown up. And after 5pm I can forget about work until next day? At university the stress of deadlines, or fear of failing this or the other never ended.
In some ways yes, in some ways no.
From a technical perspective there's a lot less pressure to be the be all and end all. You have colleagues to support you, you don't have to memorize everything, you have access to stackoverflow, and especially early in your career people won't expect much from you in terms of solving technical problems, it's more just putting in the hours and the effort.
But on the other end you'll have to deal with a whole swathe of challenges when it comes to people and management issues. Workflows, communication problems, process issues, managing expectations, misalignment between stakeholders, things breaking at 2AM, etc.
Depending on the workplace culture some people will have it better than others, but I feel like a lot of tech people underestimate the importance and value of soft skills. In my own workplace, the people that I find to be the most valuable and impactful in their jobs are the ones who lead and communicate well (even if they're not in a management position), not necessarily the guys with the best raw technical skills.
What I remember learning was that when you are in school, you are never actually done. There is always an assignment still due, a paper to write, etc. Only between semesters was there downtime.
As a younger engineer, first 7 years or so, work is very different. Walk out the door, don't think about work until the next day. It is awesome! And much less stressful than school because of the clean lines between work and home.
Then you get more senior (I am at 30+ years) and it wraps around, and you can't stop thinking about work sometimes. But it's fun, nonetheless.
Why I'm a better employee than student:
1. Money - easier to motivate myself. Might be mixed in with the overall maturity needed to not get fired and have problems supporting my family.
2. Time - Knowing I have dedicated 'work hours' is better than the general expectation that classroom time is just a fraction of the time/energy I put towards school. Clock out at 5 and I don't have to think about anything until the next morning.
3. Priorities - related to the time thing. If I have competing priorities and deadlines at work I can reorganize. There were plenty of times in school where I had a big test in one class and a big paper due the exact same time and good luck explaining to any teacher or professor that you've got two (or more!) things due on the same day.
4. Priorities part 2 - so much of school was us in group projects because "that's what you'll do in the real world" except its much easier in the real world because I don't have to coordinate a time between 5 people who have wildly different class schedules and other extra curriculars or work.
tl;dr there's a reason I still have bad dreams about me realizing I forgot to attend a class all semester and never any dreams about the time I had to tell my boss I forgot to come to work.
In general, would any day agree to this. I prefer the work life over student life, hence decided to not study further after graduation "just because peers are doing so" I was very very stressed at Uni.
Working *can* be much easier than school, or it can be a stressful mess, depending on the work environment. But that said, even in a good working environment, I would definitely watch out for stagnation. A team that really has their shit together can make it very easy to feel like you know all there is to know about software development, and kind of just sit on that situation. It’s definitely better to always be keeping your eye on what’s happening in the wider world and learning about the promising new stuff.
Depends on what you are doing, for maintenance there will be some days where it becomes hard, but generally it's a pretty steady flow. You are creating a new product concept? There is a lot of factors that you have to consider, so there is a lot more harder things associated with that. But overall, school was way harder than work. I abhorred calculus, and several engineering classes, and I had to study/work for them much harder than what I do currently.
Professional job is way easier than my CS classes. Had to learn and grok so many things every fucking semester. Imagine learning normal form/BNF/Chomsky normal form/lexers and OS/schedulers/multithreading for the first time in the same 8 weeks before midterms, that's not even counting electives. Really fucking insane.
I think a lot of my work is probably more difficult than what I did in school, but I'm so much more comfortable with it now that it doesn't bother me. Like I struggled for weeks on projects doing simple sorting, algorithms etc, but now I can pick them up better.
What I think makes working feel so much better is that I can compartmentalize so much better. I used to have trouble sleeping because I was stressed about a test the next day, or worried about other projects and assignments. I already have pretty rough insomnia but constantly thinking about the short term deadlines and keeping my brain in school work mode through the evenings really stressed me out haha.
I know a lot of jobs don't let you go out of sight out of mind out of work hours, but the ones I've taken have, and my quality of life is much higher
the routine is nice ... and the power dynamic is better (professor doesn't control your future)
and you feel like your learning something that will tangibly benefit your life as opposed to the snake oil college's often sell
Not for me. I'd much rather do leetcode, or hell, prove runtimes of obscure algorithms all day than dealing with another idiot that wants me to "sync up" and "align roadmaps" for 30 minutes in zoom
When I was a student, I remember being told, at every stage, "Just wait 'til you get to -- things will be so much harder," and it was sometimes (but rarely) true.
Then when I was a teacher, I saw it even more as the farce that it is.
Some jobs are very hard. Being a software developer, even, can be very hard. I have days where the work is extremely challenging, but (especially in my current job) it's almost never emotionally taxing. It's just "here's a hard problem and we'll work on it together until it's done."
But most problems are relatively straightforward.
The second hardest problems I've had to work on have been people, process, and communication problems. Most of the time, if those things are relatively sorted, the technical stuff is pretty fine.
The hardest problems I've worked on are when folks try to build technical solutions to what are ultimately internal people, process, or communication problems instead of going to talk to each other. Untangling petty power squabbles is annoying, and even more so when the effects of those weird struggles permeate the entire codebase.
Man, I'm a couple months into my first dev job and on a very busy team and it feels way more emotionally taxing than school ever did. School could be hard, and there were deadlines, but I always felt like I could figure it out and get it done. And if I didn't, or if I did something wrong, I'd only be letting myself down. I feel mentally drained a lot of days after work and it's living rent free in my head even when I'm off the clock.Maybe this is more a symptom of my current role and team where I'm doing way more support than project work and there is a sense of urgency from the business end (although how genuine that urgency is it's sometimes hard to tell). Or maybe it's just part of being new.
Pretty normal to feel like an idiot for the first three months of the job
I'm 10 years into my career and pressure at companies can be excessive. My company is probably trying to IPO so it doesn't give a fuck about the work it's generating for it's workforce right now. We are all crushed.
Right there with ya… I joined my current company at a weird inflection point where the amount of work was starting to roll over itself like a wave, and the engineers were trying their damndest to stay afloat. It’s gotten better in the few months since I joined, but there is still always work that needs to be done and it almost always bleeds over into my off days.
You mean you're thinking about it on your off days, or working on your off days?
Both, unfortunately. I’m not expected to work on my off days, but in order to stay on top of my workload it requires an hour or two on weekend mornings occasionally. I don’t mean to say my company is horrible or anything, the managers are all very aware of the heavy workload and are actively working to bring it down.
Lol.. stop making excuses for your employers. Your company and managers are not good people
Believe me, I understand the sentiment! I promise this isn’t a situation like that though. The company was very honest with me about the workload and challenges, and I chose to work there anyway because the work directly impacts something I care about (I work in health tech/used to work in hospital direct care).
But if your IPO goes well, you guys will get a well deserved break…right?
It’s kind of like being a super-villain with a bunch of henchmen; you get kind of a win-win situation, because either you win and take over the world and can afford to pay them all, or you lose and probably all your henchmen will have been murdered by erstwhile heroes, so you won’t have to worry too much about all the debt you accrued while trying to pay them on credit.
One can only hope
Coming from a sr dev, that's not good. Are you getting stuck and not asking for help, which then adds more pressure, or is it the culture? Are things not known before they get to you so you don't have much direction? I end up that stressed, but it's because I see a mess around me, but I'd hope my younger devs don't feel that way.
>Are you getting stuck and not asking for help, which then adds more pressure, or is it the culture? Are things not known before they get to you so you don't have much direction? I think it's often more the latter. I definitely prefer to research and figure things out on my own if I can, but I'm not afraid to ask questions, and frankly I feel like I have too much to do to waste hours trying to figure out how to do one thing. All the other developers on my team have been very helpful and friendly when I reach out, so no complaints there. We don't have a senior dev on my team though. The only one left shortly after I started. We've got 4 mid levels and 4 juniors. And the vast majority of the codebase was written by people who are no longer with the company. Also the way out sprints our planned and structured kind of stresses me out. Our sprints are 9 days long and we have to plan for 7 hours a day. So that leaves us 63 hours. When planning, we set aside 13 hours for support work (even though there is more support work than that comes in each sprint than can be fit into 13 x 8 (the number of developers on the team) hours) but then we plan for the other 50. I don't know if this is how must companies do it, but I feel like this leaves me almost no wiggle for people reaching out to me with questions, or unplanned meetings or spending extra time going over stuff with people, even just tagging along when a more experienced dev is working on something I might benefit from learning about. Maybe part of it is just me and placing overly high expectations on myself though. No has given me any negative feedback. I guess if I had to describe it the culture seems frantic and a little overwhelming, but the people are nice. I have no real basis for comparison when it comes to dev teams though.
Sprint Capacity vs Hours Worked is a scrum tale as old as time. I personally hate counting hours because you run into the issue you're describing, which is overloading your developers because the hours seems to 'fit' but will cause frustration in the short run and burn out in the long run. I perfer to run off of 'story points' rather than hours, which equates to a range of hours rather than miniute to minute totals. I have a few questions for you, and some of your answers might help how you can talk with your manager about your concerns. **Sprint Work/Sprint Estimates** \-How accurate are the estimates placed before you? Do you feel you always 'meet' them? Or are you catching up on some, failing at others so it 'shakes out in the end'. Do you typically have rollover from sprint to sprint? \-Do you feel you can safety push back on estimates to add padding to allow for the intangible drop in work (quick unplanned meetings, questions from colleagues, etc)? \-Are you able to select your stories to work on in a sprint in order to have a balance of 'quick wins' vs 'interesting/complex problems'? **Support Work** \-How much of a fire drill is your support work? Is this trying to get people/products back up? Or is it working on backlog issues? Support should work as such with on-calls only focusing on Critical's and maybe Highs during the sprint, but documenting the Mediums/Lows: * Critical (People are down, and should get them up within the next 2-4 hours) * High (Support volume is ratcheting up, but a work around exists, should be taken care of within the week) * Medium (bug/issue is backlogged and looked at in the next sprint) * Low (bug/issue is backlogged and scheduled when time is available.)
Most companies will have one person that's "on-call" that all the questions get directed to. This position rotates weekly and they get a reduced workload while on call. You post somewhere who is on call that week, and forward them any questions. What I've learned to do it have two backlogs, small bugs + annoyances, and the product backlog. When you on call, you pull from the bugs. This allows the team to work on tech debt and someone is there to help other people. Also, it's 6 hours a day for work, on an 8 hour schedule. This gives you time for scrum ceremonies (1hr) and bathroom + ramping up / down. Have you told your manager you feel this way? They probably don't want to burn you out given the market for devs.
I ended up blending part time delivery gig (for cooling off mentally and moving, seeing people) with part time small projects on my own, so I could decide the features, pacing etc It was a good balance.
You learn more in the first 6 months if work than your entire college history
> "here's a hard problem and we'll work on it together until it's done." key to life
I actually find the notion of the next level being harder quite interesting. It's definitely true on so many levels. At least until you become an independent adult generally the level of responsibility and risk of failing increases. In early education you are pretty much guaranteed to get to the next grade regardless of what you. At the same time there are many people dropping out of college and losing their jobs. I think this is a big part of what drives teachers to talk about the next level being harder. On the other hand the further you go the more freedom you have in what you do and what your goals are. Especially when you inherited some wealth and your skills are well paid you can probably coast with ease similar to early levels. I think this is another factor driving teachers to talk about the next level being harder. Teaching is a hard job that isn't paid very well. Hence for teachers the terminal level might very well be the hardest.
there are a lot of people who would bluff you *things will be so much harder** but i realize cs is just math. when you dunno the solution, everything is very hard. once you know the solution, the problem is trivial.
I wish CS was just like math. But it's not. Sometimes (can be a lot depending on the job) it's trying to decipher poorly documented code that doesn't follow your personal logic or best practices.
A solution is not necessarily easy to understand. Irrelevant.
And once you know a solution, it doesn’t mean its applicable everywhere else. Especially when you’re dealing with unknown architectures you didn’t write. Sure, solving known math equations is trivial, but new ones you or other’s don’t know the solutions to aren’t. If I’m writing everything from scratch, my way, on my own, things are definitely much easier (albeit longer). But it doesn’t necessarily work that way.
Actual “computer science” is lots of math. But the vast majority of programmers/developers are designers or engineers, not mathematicians. In engineering, there isn’t “one true solution”, but rather a number of ways to solve a problem, each with it’s own costs, compromises, etc.
But the system is *supposed* to do it eksaurus. What should we do?
The hardest part is that shit ultimately rolls downhill to us. When anyone adjacent to us doesn't do their job properly we ultimately have to solve the problem. If you have a skilled developer that doesn't speak up it can make a whole lot of incompetent people around them look competent.
Said in another way, once you know your domain the rest is all the same as any other office job. It's almost always people problems: effective communication, team-building, organizing effort, free bagels in the break room, etc
School has this vibe of, "You have to succeed otherwise we'll kick you out." Work will also kick you out if you fail too much, but first they're going to put in a ton of effort to make you successful, such as having available teammates help you, have managers do coaching with you, and generally having to deal with the paperwork that comes with firing someone. The company invested time and money on hiring you, they want to make sure their energy expenditure was worth it. School is "you failed too many classes bye"
Success lies in the hands of those who want it.
Not having the constant spectre of homework, reading, or upcoming exams is amazing. The knowledge that 'this might be all life is' is worse.
I feel like having hobbies outside of work keeps those feelings away.
My hobby used to be programming... :(
The best way to make your hobby feel like work is to do it for a living.
I mean it still can be. I still love working on side projects and recently, game dev. Rarely is programming the actual stressful part of my job. When I'm building what I want I don't have to worry about getting my tickets knocked out, reporting to management, sitting through meetings, etc. I just get to do the fun part of the job. Honestly, it's become even more fun since I've been a professional dev, because my work has really improved my overall skills and being able to apply those skills into my hobbies. Where I'm currently at, my side projects have gone from month long ventures, to some fun things that I build on a weekend.
Exactly. Once you’ve gotten past all the bullshit, you can shape your life into what you want to be.
Depends if those hobbies help you ignore the emptiness or actually fill it. Unfortunately I think it is often the former.
>The knowledge that 'this might be all life is' is worse. Yeah, it's weird seeing this unfold especially once you're say 1-2 years into your first job. You're 25, you're making good money, you can buy basically all the middle-upper class luxuries you like and it's like: congrats you have a stable existence now what do you want? Many of us get here by just continually making incremental "right" choices without any grand considerations of our life arc. I guess this is the idea of the "quarter-life crisis". Better to have these thoughts earlier rather than later tbh.
I said it in my own comment but yeah the fact that so much of school was outside the classroom was a huge challenge for me personally. The fact that I can keep my work in the (virtual remote) office and not worry about it once I log out for the day is a big relief compared to showing up for an hour and a half to be told I'll need to do several hours of reading to be ready for next week.
I personally found my work to be much easier. Here's why: * I'm not expected to memorize things. * I'm not expected to know everything right off the bat. * I'm given sufficient time and am able to give estimates for tasks. * I can negotiate deadlines or move them sometimes. * I get paid for the work I do. * I can walk away from work and do literally anything else but work. * My coworkers are friendly and want me to succeed. * My work is collaborative. * I can work at my own pace. Of course, the work I do is actually significantly more difficult than school. But the environment really helps alleviate that pain.
One other thing to mention is that in school you're often working on 4-5 discrete topics at any given time. Even if they're in the same domain (i.e. CS/your major) they can be wildly different mental workloads so you're constantly switching not only the context of a course but also the processes of each professor: expected work, tests, papers, etc. In the real world you're unlikely to work on more than 2-3 things at time, the work itself is fairly consistent in its execution or domain, and if you do more it's generally in an oversight position where details are less important.
For me right now, I feel like learning is the most exhausting not that the problems are that hard per se but the constant battle with trying to understand foreign concepts instead of applying you knowledge to work out new things. Now yes doing it that way will get better results but makes it imo harder
> I'm not expected to memorize things. memorization exams in the academic settings is the most stupid thing i have ever come across in life. this damn thing causes me life-long troubles.
For CS yes but not for a medical doctor.
My sons pediatrician flat out walked out of the room, googled something we asked, came back, and told us he googled it and this was what google said. It was some food safety thing, I can't remember the specifics, but it really made me laugh how much we rely on Google in all professions.
If you ask questions outside thr doctors specialty he is likely only slightly better than avarage layman. The thing that has an edge is that the doctor would use a different google keyword and can filter trash results
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Sure, but some stuff they don't. Like they gotta know the body, just in case something happens while cutting you up they gotta know what. They don't have time to Google
Absolutely. If school and uni exams were open-book, I'd have enjoyed it 100x more
I think its fundamentally easier to be given a problem with somewhat flexible parameters and then be given freedom to solve it in whatever way I think is best than to be given an unnecessarily rigid problem for which I am intended to converge on a single solution that was extrapolated from what was "taught" to me the week before at 8:30am.
Work being collaborative is huge. That and work is a dedicated 40 hours or so a week at your tasks. School requires context switching and figuring it out on your own. I would say that real world apps are quite more complex than a school project. But you are 1 engineer of many. So your scope can be more narrow. And if you get stuck, you have experienced teammates to lean on or hell even the internet. And time.
>the work I do is actually significantly more difficult than school. actually this hasn't even been the case for me yet in my 2.5 years as a dev so far, my classes were very tough. granted I did go to a top 10 cs school
I remember talking about this to a friend of mine. Working at big tech companies is exactly like school without the bad parts. There is no homework, no quizzes, no finals. You get to solve problems and get paid. Some places like Google will even have free food. A big difference is that it’ll be slightly harder to make friends and find love interest at work compared to universities.
Except work is 40 hours a week. School you don't even have to go to class if you work it out right. I could get by doing less than 10 hours of work a week in school. I prefer a set amount of work that you can complete in your own time. Maybe I should be a contractor.
It depends a lot on the specific school plus if you're a commuter or not. If you're a commuter, modern curriculums fucking *suck* for school-life balance. * I'm a commuter student, 1 hour each way so off the bat I have 10 hours committed. * Senior capstone course is 6 hours worth of class time + 10 hours worth of work on a project (tracked through Jira/Chronos). * CS elective that has 2 hours worth of lectures I can't miss, plus about 6-8 hours a week on assignments * gen-eds adding up to about 8 hours together So assuming everything goes smoothly, I have to commit *at least* 32 hours just to school alone. That's not including how much time I have to spend actually working to afford expenses & tuition. And that's just for a Bachelor's too. As a commuter I also basically can't have a decent routine or set schedule. I have to get up fairly early (for a college student) at 8-9, go home mid-day in the afternoon at 3-5pm tired from fighting traffic for an hour straight with my brain fried from lectures and meetings despite the fact its only mid-day, and still have about 4-6 hours worth of schoolwork I still have to complete that evening. My day is essentially as if I was working a 9-5 at school and then going home and working from 6-10. The dumb part is I have to spend half the time at school sitting around because of 30 min - 1 hour blocks breaking up lecture times where there's no way I could be productive. It takes me a half hour just to fully context switch and get focused. Its honestly exhausting, the hard hours completed doesn't amount to a lot but having to commute in the middle of what is essentially your "work day" is brutal. It just destroys any flow you have and you have to waste time context switching to get focused again when you get home. Plus my most productive hours are by far the mid-morning to afternoon and those are essentially always eaten up by commutes and lectures. I have a remote job lined up after graduating and am grateful as **fuck** that I won't have to commute, like honest to god over the moon. I don't care that I'll technically be working more hours a day, at least they'd actually be more productive and in a singular block where I can definitely "shut off" after 5pm and not be constantly stressed about assignments.
This sounds like what I was dealing with. Commuting to school, paying for parking, commuting to work, having no time to do homework or any hobbies reliably. No time for self care. That's why I dropped out, after losing my financial aid.
Did you work while you were at school? Sounds impossible with your schedule
You also can find jobs that isn’t 40 hours per week.
Or at a minimum one that lets you work whenever you feel like it as long as you get your stuff done.
Highschool was 39 hours a week + tons of homework and studying, work now is 38.5
Don’t most people work through school? _Most_ semesters, school was less than 40 hours (there were like 2 exceptions), but it’s on top of working 40-50 hours a week. Going from that to only working 30-40 hours a week is a world of difference.
Not even close do most people work through school. A vast vast vast majority do not have a job throughout it.
It's pretty common to work at least part time but I don't know a lot of people who worked full time through school. Honestly idk how people can manage that because I barely managed working part time while in school.
That’s crazy to me because I personally didn’t know a single person in my classes that didn’t work
Can I ask your a question? How do you get a degree full time and still work the whole time? Doesn’t seem possible
To answer your question frankly, I was super busy. I took 12-13 hours per semester (so just right on the line of full time) and worked my hours across multiple jobs that were quite flexible. I would do one of them about 20-25 hours a week and that one was usually weekends early morning or night time (like 9pm-1am ish). My “main” job was at one point a part time warehouse job that I worked in the evening and took classes during the day, but once I started getting internships I started taking afternoon classes and working my internships part time and then continued my side job in the night/weekends. My senior year I ended up getting a full time developer position that still gave a bit of flexibility and quit my side job. I would come in early every day so I could leave early 2 days a week for class and had to take some classes online. It sounds worse than it was when I write it down. I admit I was quite busy and I had my free time split into hourly blocks on google calendar and would schedule/reschedule literally everything. From work, to individual assignments, to studying, and even to playing video games a few nights a week. I was tired of school by the end of it but it was still an enjoyable period of my life.
At my school there were a lot of campus jobs that were fine with you working 12 hours a week.
Really?? I only knew like 1 person total that worked out of necessity (besides internships over the summer)
Oh hm maybe just a regional thing. I also don’t have any student loans so it came with its benefits lol. I did internships all year round which was helpful career wise too.
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Linked to lower grades, so presumably a disadvantage for students who don't have parental wealth: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4462956.stm
I think it depends from person to person, but school for me was extremely draining and took waaaaay more than 40 hours. You combine the 15 hours of courses, plus the commute, plus the homework, plus the waiting time between classes, plus the studying, plus the planning, plus attending extra-curricular stuff... all of sudden I'm looking at 60-70 hours of work each week.
You must not have to work to put yourself through school.
I thought we were comparing work to school, not work to work + school? Of course work alone is better than working a worse job *and* going to school. Edit: For the record, I did work through school except for my freshman year. Thanks for being an asshole, though.
I think it's worth exploring what you mean by *easy*. I think the actual problems you solve in school are *easier*. This is generally because the problems have been curated so that getting to an answer is usually pretty formulaic, and there always **is** an answer. However, I've found life to be *easier* because you can put in your hours and not worry about work once you leave. Contrast that with school when you always have stuff going on: projects, homework, upcoming tests, etc.
>and there always **is** an answer. Wew, this hit. I've spent so much time trying to solve some core problems that turn out to just be not solvable. ----- One in particular is converting between various fiat currencies an arbitrary number of times without ever losing precision. -turns out you just can't... Most currencies base units are equivalent to the cent with hundredth place precision. If you multiply and divide numbers with hundredth precision you may need more precision to get an exact value before rounding to the nearest hundredth. Ex. 4.20 * 0.69 = 2.898 If you round now you have a .002 discrepancy, if you round later you need to store floats with potentially limitless precision. Explaining this to the non-engineering stakeholders was a challenge.
Dude I’ve had so many managers think that I’m manipulating them because I use overly technical terminology to explain why I can’t get certain things done. One of them was like “Why can’t you just give me an estimation in plain English?” And I almost, ALMOST ripped him and said “Oh I’m sorry, I thought a product manager’s job was to understand the fucking product, like how the formats of the files I was sending back were XMLs—but I guess that’s just too fucking complicated for a retarded business major like y—“ but I held my breath and explained the reason as calmly as I could and insulted him behind his back to friends outside of my company instead.
Agreed, I'm surprised to hear that school seems to be difficult in other places. But then, I went to a run of the mill college in Latin America and now work at a FAANG. My work is arguably more challenging than any exam and homework I was given in college, however, at 5pm I close my work MacBook and call it a day, no need to say that I'm often on reddit and casually game with some coworkers on work hours too.
Which Latin America country are you from??
Costa Rica, I've also lived in El Salvador and Panama, and often travel to Brazil.
Might be a Costa Rica thing. I know of schools in 2 other countries where school is hell. The degree is supposed to be 5 years long but it takes a lot of people 7
Could be a mix of our curriculums having barely any "filler classes", having semesters rather than quarters (the course material is more spread out), commuting, and well, going to an average college rather than to a top one. But yeah, college here is quite easy, it's common for everybody to have a part-time job, and most of my classmates also studied English on weekends.
How much leetcode did you do?
A few more than the Blind-75 + the weekly contests. However, I preach here that you must learn the patterns and learn problem solving rather than attempting to memorize the problems and hoping to get the same one on the interview.
Wow didn't know this list of problems/concepts existed, Thanks! Kinda, makes me regret getting LC premium.
I find work easier because no one got the solution. I don’t have to guess what is expected, I just do my thing, I do it well, and if you have a better solution let me know and we’ll go your way. If I don’t know how to do something I research it, and solve it.
I don't think the printmaking I solved in school were easier. Me and my other SE friend were trying to help her daughter with her CS homework and we couldn't do it. It was such a nonsense assignment that had nothing to do with programming. She eventually figured it out on her own.
I think being paid is one of the reasons but I'm not too sure..
Work is easier and less stressful, but takes up so much more time. And is more boring I'd say.
Agreed. Getting paid is pretty awesome, though. It sucks sitting in class not making money.
Yeah the money is definitely a decent motivator that's for sure lol
> but takes up so much more time. This is going to vary by school and program. I don't think I ever had a free weekend in college, there was always work to do.
Exactly I dont know why I am seeing comments of people saying they only need <10 hours a week to keep up with school. At my uni you gotta be on the grind daily. Really burns out some people.
When I was in there I just got used to never feeling done or ahead of the curve. It was like a perpetual state of when you have so much to do and you're so far behind that you just admit defeat and take a nap.
School was multiple classes. Some of which weren't related. I had a job + lectures + homework so it was micromanaging different classes. Job is just job. You don't have to write an English paper due end of the week while simultaneously working on a project. Instead it's all your hours to your 1 job and if you don't finish, you checkout and get back at it the next day/week.
Damn, where did you go to college? I spend about an hour a week on homework. I have a semi-decent GPA (3.3) and I have one more class to take until I graduate.
Bruh, an hour a week? I’ve had CLASSES that estimated 20 hours a week of studying/homework in order to do well. Obviously not all classes were like that, but still. This was at a top 5ish school.
A top 5 school. Problem sets were easily 5+ hours each, usually more if you did them by yourself instead of in a group. I mean just reading CLRS adds up quickly before you even try the problems.
One hour. _One hour?_ I have lab reports from weekly labs that take 8 hours to do if you want to do them right- and that's after I wrote a stupid amount of them, because at first they literally took me 12-18 hours. Good for you that your college experience was so pleasantly easy, mine is a bloody grind.
I find that work is challenging, but it's fun. I get paid to work in a field I enjoy whereas for school, I'm paying money to get a headache 😐
Probably out of the norm, but my job is much, much harder than college though I do work in the semiconductor industry. Maybe... Maybe I'm just dumb.
Yeah I was reading all this thinking am I the only one? I do FPGAs and the shit I deal with is a joke compared to school.
Joke as in much tougher? HDL is fun, can't imagine doing it full time tho 😭 Xilinx?
It depends completely on your job. You, i'm guessing, went from college straight to your first job as a developer. You never had to work late nights in a factory, getting yourself and your clothes filthy and drained of all energy. You likely never even worked in a busy retail store, with managers hounding you to be productive. I did those jobs before I became a developer, and trust me - it's the job that's easy, not working in general. There are even more miserable jobs out there.
I worked in hospitality for 10 years, 5 of them in middle-management. There's no way in hell being a developer is going to be more soul-crushing than that. I'm so pumped.
I come from pretty much the exact same background and have been employed as a software engineer for almost a year now, and I can say very confidently (at least from my own experience) that it is not even in the same ballpark. If you enjoy software even a little bit, I have a feeling it's going to be a night and day difference for you. It can be a little stressful getting started because of the learning curve but you get used to it, and depending on where you work it's genuinely *amazing* how much less taxing I've found this industry than that of restaurants/hospitality. I know I haven't been doing it a long, but after a year I've gotten a pretty solid idea of what I like and what I don't like about doing this, and I have absolutely never been this happy with my job. Two years ago I probably wouldn't have ever expected to be where I am now, but now I can't imagine ever doing anything else.
As someone who worked in hospitality: it isn’t. And it’s interesting. And also yeah you might get shitty coworkers, but they are still more rational and pragmatic and intelligent and open to collaboration then the big majority of restaurant managers and customers. Ill never forget how I got fired from a restaurant for saying no to a short notice call because I had to go pickup my mother at an airport (and I had notified the manager weeks in advance). I never looked for a job again in hospitality after that
I worked in a group home. Had to learn to cook for others, cleaned adults’ dirty butts, had to calm down angry people with mental disabilities who would literally punch through a wall.
You're a better person than I am, I could never do that kind of stuff. Would never want to.
Seeing all these comments is giving me some relief. I’m currently doing my Master of Information Technology (Did a B.Sc in maths) and work a bit less than part time at the moment (my boss is quite flexible), and the work load honestly feels never ending. Beyond study, work, cooking, general life admin, and exercising, I barely find any time at all to engage my hobbies and interests, and when I do I am exhausted. I have worked full time in my holidays and the nice part about work is that it ends at 5. Uni never ends and I often find myself working late into the night for weeks on end. I’m really looking forward to having some cash, time, and not constantly having the cloud of homework/assignments over my head.
I work full time summers, and by god am I less stressed, I catch up on hobbies, life in general rolls.
Idk about yall, I graduated in 2020, and in our final exam, we wrote fucking code on paper. I still remember getting marks off cuz I forgot one semicolon in the first year. Shits impossible. Why am I supposed to remember regex expressions? Why am I supposed to remember every little minute detail? I have been working for 2 years or so now, 3.5 including internships, it's SO much easier than school. I think I am a pretty decent developer, but in school, my grades were complete asscheeks, because writing code on paper makes literally no sense.
I failed out of college because I couldn't stick to my classwork, but I find it pretty easy to excel at my job.
It depends. You can work for a chill company or go hard at a startup. The difference is, its up to you to make things happen.
Deadlines can suck and yeah as you already mentioned, interview prep and constant rejection is trash Edit: however making 6 figures and overall having stable mental health isn’t much to complain about.
Generally, yes. Working is normally bounded to 30-50 hours per week. School took 70+ hours, plus industry research, side projects, etc.
Work is SOOOOO much easier lol. Most days I'm literally doing like 20 minutes of work and then I'm done.
Recently transitioned from 50 hours of warehouse work and 20 hours of classes to tech. Holy shit it's great. 95% of my tasks are now fully automated. The other 5%, is fuel to fully automate and upskill in the process.
lol what's your work?
At school 99% of the assignments might be challenging. At work 99% of the work/assignments are doable/easy BUT THAT 1% will keep you up all night scratching your head. I think the most challenging thing is having solid requirements or getting people to agree on something.
What about the comments here that say they close their work at about 5pm and forget about it till the next morning? Can I expect that as common or does it only depend on the company?
By 11 AM I'm usually done. After lunch might have 30 minutes BS meeting then that's it. This happens once the project is mature enough and going through the maintenance phase. But there were days when I was working till 11PM ! It all depends on the project and the team.
God I hope it’s easier. I’m tired, I just want to graduate and be done. Full time school + part time work + freelance is killing me
I haven't started working yet but all my friends who graduated from CS programs and have been working tell me that it's so much easier than when they were in school. The reason they give is usually along the lines that when you're working you're usually honed in on a specific objective or project. That's not the case for school where you have to study your ass off for subjects that you couldn't care less about. The same goes for graduate school. When I was doing my master's it was so much more pleasant than my undergrad.
Where did you do your masters?
I don't know. I have to work 8 hours a day, but when I was in school I could do everything in 2-3 hours and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends or just enjoying life.
I think that's sorta the idea - frontload a bunch of training and knowledge into a half decade of school and junior development so that when you're posed with the sort of hard problem needed to build cool stuff, you can solve it fairly easily. IMO the work isn't meaningfully easier, and if it is harder it's not much harder, but you're much *much* smarter now.
It depends on the rigor of your degree program, other life events, and your personal approach to school. Many of my friends had extremely challenging academics *plus* Real Life Shit in their college years, with very limited social support. (Edit: Like, some commenters here had 2-3 hour days; a *normal* course load at my school was 50 hrs/week, not counting research, work, or extracurriculars.) Personally, nothing at work can hold a candle to the challenge that was college. No matter what the work problem, I worked longer on harder problems with less sleep in college. And that's comforting. We are unbelievably fortunate in this field for a multitude of reasons.
I lost sleep and did more coding at my bootcamp than I do now at my job, still trying get used to it
Yes, you really study only a few years but most people work for like 4 decades, so yeah, it is expected to have some chill times
The real fun is to do both 🙃
It's easier because we don't have to memorize a bunch of useless stuff and we can use Google if we forget somethings. Also getting paid a shit ton also helps.
School drains me like nothing else. The expectation and requirement to work all day every single day of the week on hw/projects/studying (especially subjects I didnt care for) and being graded for every little thing made school a shit experience and unbearable if it weren't for friends. I say this as a person whos has upkept a 4.0 gpa since elementary school through college, so my perception may be different than others of the education system.
For me, work life is harder but it has very little to do with work itself. It's the fact that I'm an adult now and I have to do adult stuff. School might have been a bit more draining and tedious but after I went home, I did fuck all.
What is your day-to-day routine before and after work? I'm struggling with this too.
Work is way more legit. School was such a stressful time.
I find it very difficult, for me personally. Maybe I snuck through the educational system on the coattails of my intelligent classmates. I'm struggling and can't get anywhere. I thought about it, and I've contributed absolutely nothing to any codebase anywhere. I think there's a reason for that. Currently looking for another job outside of the industry because I'm tired of letting people down and not producing anything.
Yes. Unfortunately you have to do it for around 40 years though.
Not in this profession, cap
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Some people do some people don’t, either way if you play your cards right and are good with your finances you shouldn’t be working till your 60+
Not in this profession, cap
If you had to work that long in this field, you did it wrong.
I think work is a lot easier for me as well, and I graduated in 2021. In school you always had so many things to stress about 24/7. I'm not saying work is easy but I only have to deal with it for 8 hours a day.
I mean yeah. In school I was working full time plus some side jobs on top of studying and now I’m working 1 job from home and not going to class. It’s impossible for that to not be easier lol
Work is Harder with no seniors. No teacher to ask questions
Is it really easier? I’m a student right now and it’s tough but I’m getting through it, but man sometimes I find myself overwhelmed and just burned out.
I hope this is indeed true
School is supposed to fill your head with everything you might possibly need to know to get any of dozens of jobs in your field. Most jobs these days involve updating a spreadsheet without breaking it.
One of unpopular opinions here, but work is way more difficult than school. Pair programming heavily everyday. Cannot work at my own pace. People watching over shoulder puts a lot of stress. Depending on the work, it's like trying to follow university lecture except you also have to constantly talk. It feels like I'm in tech interview everyday lol.
I mean I view school as a place to really develop your work ethic. It could seem easier just because you have spent many years developing good work ethics.
> I can honestly say that working is much more pleasant and easier than school speak for yourself
I think it depends on your team, workload, and responsibilities, but it’s definitely been much easier for me.
Depends on how rigorous your major is but yeah. Most jobs are menial, repetitive and easy. And you don't have to bring work home with you. School can be very mentally challenging and requires more time commitment, studying, and dedication. That being said, I'll take school over work because at least with school you are making an investment into yourself in the hopes of landing a great paying career. Many jobs are dead end paths that lead to nowhere, and the thought of doing the same task for years over and over is enough to make someone lose all hope. At least there is variety in the stuff you do in school and a sense of progression.
student is 0 hours week until exams much better than 40/week
Much to my disappointment, work has been far easier and far less interesting than my education. But I’ve probably managed my career poorly.
Is it easier? Or are you just more mature?
What do you mean easier? Easier as in technical problem? No, it is harder. More pleasant? Might be if you consider studying is hard (I am not, study is easy). And you might work responsibilities is more pressure.
I'm at a FAANG and school was definitely harder
YES
Yes
Depends on the day, but on average my professors were much, much more strict than any job I’ve ever had. I’ve had situations where my senior developer friends commented on how absurdly difficult my assignments were.
There's too much variation here to say for sure. There's a big range of difficulties/workloads for school (from, say, your local commuter school to the Ivies). And a big range of difficulties/workloads for jobs. For example, I went to a school somewhere in the middle, which I found to be easy and relaxed, but I've chased compensation and ended up at the high end for work, so work is a lot harder than school was. But I'm sure it would be a lot closer if I'd gone to Stanford or something, or if I'd stayed at my first job (which was similar to or easier than school).
Ultimately it's all highly contingent upon the workplace you're in and the school you're coming from. I work in a large investment bank and I definitely think the day-to-day grind is less stressful and more rewarding than in university. If I were working on a different team (same employer) that'd be a different calculation, some teams are basically on-call 24/7 and constantly dealing with scaling problems etc. And not all universities / colleges are the same. Some have very lax standards and low expectations. Some you can cruise and others have such demanding, complex coursework it's worse than a full-time job. So yeah, get past the interview stages and into the right job and it'll be more chill than university. You'll make reasonable money too if you work hard and are adaptable. This is a pretty good career path all things considered. The "it'll be much more stressful once you're in the workplace" meme doesn't always hold. It's very contingent on where you go to work.
You got a good thing going, never join Amazon :p I also feel work life is easier than school. It's more like this - school on paper, prepares you for the entire spectrum of the field - from pure science to engineering. It's just we picked engineering (which happens to be the most paid and in-demand field also) so maybe it's easier for us. I'm sure the professors you mentioned or people working on really critical projects may have it hard. Also, I feel technical problems don't make your life hard as nearly as dealing with people - this includes pressure from your manager, meeting deadlines, toxic work culture, process complexities and all. Rarely do people quit jobs because the technical stuff was too challenging, that I can say for sure is tougher at school with the assignments and a student's general lack of knowledge and experience. Technical stuff can get complex very fast in big companies also though, which can get extremely difficult to solve as well (I've only heard war stories and not experienced problems at that level yet though). But I also prefer it this way, athletes and the military usually train for scenarios way tougher than 90% actual ones, so should engineers no?
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Depends on where you went to school and what your job entails. Could go either way
Question on this topic: right now we're studying using python to send automated emails. Is this something I'm honestly going to be expected to know in a typical SE job? Because it's boring as hell and feels ridiculous.
Depends on the work culture tbh in my experience both work and studies have been stressful. But still studies were much pleasant compared to work
I had a massive anxiety disorder in school (still do, honestly) and I was always terrified that if I couldn't get myself to school when I'm a child and being taken care of, how would I ever have a job without missing loads of time and getting fired? Turns out, Jobs are wayyyyy easier than school ever was and the fact you get some autonomy for things like breaks, lunches, what work you do when (to some extent) makes it much less daunting of a thing.
My worst days at work have been better than my best days at school. I felt very much alone in school. Assignment didn't work, TA doesn't help much, get a 0. Can't get something at work, whole team works on it together until it's solved.
yes for sure. I remember when I got my first job I thought: that's easier than uni projects, and it even pays me money? Enough money to live in an expensive city like a grown up. And after 5pm I can forget about work until next day? At university the stress of deadlines, or fear of failing this or the other never ended.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. From a technical perspective there's a lot less pressure to be the be all and end all. You have colleagues to support you, you don't have to memorize everything, you have access to stackoverflow, and especially early in your career people won't expect much from you in terms of solving technical problems, it's more just putting in the hours and the effort. But on the other end you'll have to deal with a whole swathe of challenges when it comes to people and management issues. Workflows, communication problems, process issues, managing expectations, misalignment between stakeholders, things breaking at 2AM, etc. Depending on the workplace culture some people will have it better than others, but I feel like a lot of tech people underestimate the importance and value of soft skills. In my own workplace, the people that I find to be the most valuable and impactful in their jobs are the ones who lead and communicate well (even if they're not in a management position), not necessarily the guys with the best raw technical skills.
What I remember learning was that when you are in school, you are never actually done. There is always an assignment still due, a paper to write, etc. Only between semesters was there downtime. As a younger engineer, first 7 years or so, work is very different. Walk out the door, don't think about work until the next day. It is awesome! And much less stressful than school because of the clean lines between work and home. Then you get more senior (I am at 30+ years) and it wraps around, and you can't stop thinking about work sometimes. But it's fun, nonetheless.
Why I'm a better employee than student: 1. Money - easier to motivate myself. Might be mixed in with the overall maturity needed to not get fired and have problems supporting my family. 2. Time - Knowing I have dedicated 'work hours' is better than the general expectation that classroom time is just a fraction of the time/energy I put towards school. Clock out at 5 and I don't have to think about anything until the next morning. 3. Priorities - related to the time thing. If I have competing priorities and deadlines at work I can reorganize. There were plenty of times in school where I had a big test in one class and a big paper due the exact same time and good luck explaining to any teacher or professor that you've got two (or more!) things due on the same day. 4. Priorities part 2 - so much of school was us in group projects because "that's what you'll do in the real world" except its much easier in the real world because I don't have to coordinate a time between 5 people who have wildly different class schedules and other extra curriculars or work. tl;dr there's a reason I still have bad dreams about me realizing I forgot to attend a class all semester and never any dreams about the time I had to tell my boss I forgot to come to work.
It's easier, but the consequences of failure are much more severe.
In general, would any day agree to this. I prefer the work life over student life, hence decided to not study further after graduation "just because peers are doing so" I was very very stressed at Uni.
Working *can* be much easier than school, or it can be a stressful mess, depending on the work environment. But that said, even in a good working environment, I would definitely watch out for stagnation. A team that really has their shit together can make it very easy to feel like you know all there is to know about software development, and kind of just sit on that situation. It’s definitely better to always be keeping your eye on what’s happening in the wider world and learning about the promising new stuff.
Depends on what you are doing, for maintenance there will be some days where it becomes hard, but generally it's a pretty steady flow. You are creating a new product concept? There is a lot of factors that you have to consider, so there is a lot more harder things associated with that. But overall, school was way harder than work. I abhorred calculus, and several engineering classes, and I had to study/work for them much harder than what I do currently.
No but you get paid
Professional job is way easier than my CS classes. Had to learn and grok so many things every fucking semester. Imagine learning normal form/BNF/Chomsky normal form/lexers and OS/schedulers/multithreading for the first time in the same 8 weeks before midterms, that's not even counting electives. Really fucking insane.
I think a lot of my work is probably more difficult than what I did in school, but I'm so much more comfortable with it now that it doesn't bother me. Like I struggled for weeks on projects doing simple sorting, algorithms etc, but now I can pick them up better. What I think makes working feel so much better is that I can compartmentalize so much better. I used to have trouble sleeping because I was stressed about a test the next day, or worried about other projects and assignments. I already have pretty rough insomnia but constantly thinking about the short term deadlines and keeping my brain in school work mode through the evenings really stressed me out haha. I know a lot of jobs don't let you go out of sight out of mind out of work hours, but the ones I've taken have, and my quality of life is much higher
High School and College made me want to kill myself. Working is about the same.
the routine is nice ... and the power dynamic is better (professor doesn't control your future) and you feel like your learning something that will tangibly benefit your life as opposed to the snake oil college's often sell
Not for me. I'd much rather do leetcode, or hell, prove runtimes of obscure algorithms all day than dealing with another idiot that wants me to "sync up" and "align roadmaps" for 30 minutes in zoom
No, but sometimes it can, all depends on the rigor of your program at school