Feeling lost in what to do and where to go.

[munkle]

So I'm in my last year of my CS degree, and up till now I have just had tech support jobs (one windows tech support for a semi truck company, and one iOS support for apple).

I'm looking at student CS jobs/internships and I'm really struggling to find something I would I would even just kind of like.

So far my favorite classes are very different from each other.

Digital system design - Basically made a cpu, audio processor, and game controller input in verilog and put that on an fpga to make a simple game console.

Database systems - fairly obvious here, worked with sql, also made an amazon type website with products, users, reviews all stored in the database I made

Web Software Architecture - Made some different websites using different web languages.

I really liked the hardware design I was doing on the fpga, but I haven't really seen any kind of internship or entry level jobs remotely related to this. Any ideas on what to look for here would be great.

Finding a web job seems fairly easy except I am not good at nor particularly like styling websites or laying out their ui, I think this is limiting me here because I like to make very functional websites but they are fairly fugly.

Basically I'm feeling that with my interests and skills I don't really fit in anywhere. Any tips would be great.

 

[450]

What are you the most skilled at?

 

[trxjw]

Web jobs can be fairly easy to find, but you have to be cautious of "unicorn" positions. The unfortunate reality of entry level positions in web development is most of them are going to make you wear a lot of different hats. On the one hand, this can be a great learning experience, but on the other hand it can really be overwhelming. Particularly if the company is smaller and wants to save money by hiring one "do it all" person instead of a few specialized resources.

However, the nice thing is that a lot of jobs are now moving into more specialized roles. There's more of a divide between front end and back-end developers, which means more of an opportunity to do integration and database work without ever having to do the UI development. You provide an API and people like myself will do the stuff you don't like. So if you're into things like Ruby, Java, PHP, etc, there are certainly opportunities to avoid CSS altogether and just focus on the stuff you enjoy. However, it's highly likely that if you get into the web space, you'll have to deal with it at some point during as an entry level developer. Just keep in mind that there are plenty of avenues you can go down to grow your career and that you won't be stuck in that spot forever. I went from building basic web sites to doing interface architecture and interaction development on enterprise level applications. Basic CSS and HTML to bleeding edge development on a MEAN stack. Couldn't be happier.

 

[TehRoot]

You're not going to get a hardware job like what you're looking for straight out with no prior experience.

Look for jobs that need coders for back-end applications pretty much. Be wary of companies that have a devops environment, since you're going to get less development time, and more develop this set of features and then completely re-do it because we have no QA team to check the actual work for customers.

I would just gather experience for now, and build up connections, you don't need to get a super amazing job right out of your degree.

tl;dr - look for backend development positions, be wary of devops-type operations, don't aim at super high elusive positions.

 

[jimmyb]

I really liked the hardware design I was doing on the fpga, but I haven't really seen any kind of internship or entry level jobs remotely related to this. Any ideas on what to look for here would be great.

Where are you looking? The big companies (Intel, AMD, nvidia, TI, Qualcomm, etc) all have lots of internships available. Many smaller ones as well.

 

[munkle]

Where are you looking? The big companies (Intel, AMD, nvidia, TI, Qualcomm, etc) all have lots of internships available. Many smaller ones as well.

Utah, Salt Lake City still have to finish my degree so for the next 8 months or so it would need to be around here. My universities career center has loads for software development, nothing in hardware unless you are an electrical engineer. L3 is big government defense contractor here, haven't checked them out yet.

What are you the most skilled at?

I'm fairly even in what I have used the most: html, php, c#, java, verilog

 

[frewtz]

I think this is limiting me here because I like to make very functional websites but they are fairly fugly.

Designing the UI and building the UI through code are, I feel, two different skill sets. One relies heavily on artistic/creative skills whereas the other leans more on logical/technical skills.

While people that excel in both do exist, I haven't been fortunate enough to meet one. At many of the companies that I've worked at, there is a team dedicated to designing the UI/UX and another that is dedicated to taking those designs and building it.

You can definitely work towards being proficient at both, but you can also leverage frameworks out there like Twitter Bootstrap and use their examples as a base for your designs.

If you're really struggling to come up w/ something that's visually pleasing, one idea you can employ is to just copy a site's layout and then slowly start to modify it in such a way that you eventually make it your own.

You're not going to get a hardware job like what you're looking for straight out with no prior experience.

Agreed. You will definitely find it challenging to land a hardware job right out of college. Unless, you know someone or have connections.

Do you have any hardware related side projects that you've worked on that you can showcase? If so, perhaps you can put together a portfolio style web site that details those projects and use it to market your skill set.

Another idea would be to just get your foot in the door at a target company and then work towards getting into the hardware side of the house by talking to the managers/engineers on those teams. I've met a few people who had non-science degrees that leveraged this strategy to get into software development. For example, I worked with a great dB architect who had a degree in Political Science.

 

[Dogs]

Be wary of companies that have a devops environment, since you're going to get less development time, and more develop this set of features and then completely re-do it because we have no QA team to check the actual work for customers.

That has literally nothing to do with dev-ops and everything to do with the shop in question having terrible processes. Saying to be wary about dev-ops teams because of problems that arise from bad QA practices is like telling someone not to buy a house near the ocean because if it catches fire it could burn down...it's just a completely non-sensical and totally uninsightful thing to say.

The thread starter should ACTIVELY SEEK OUT shops which do Dev-Ops, because shops which do Dev-Ops are generally going to be ahead of the curve in terms of processes anyways...I.E. the Dev-Ops shops are usually the shops where the QA staff are doing acceptance testing and working with customers and business analysts to make sure the requirements are properly being met....Whereas the non-Dev-Ops shops are typically the ones where you spend a quarter of your work week re-writing tech designs because your manager changed their mind about what they want you to ship to the customers (instead of you just shipping the customers what they want) and and another quarter of your work week in waterfall design meetings, and the rest of your week filling out paper work and request tickets to get IT ops to deploy your application to various pre-production environments and then working with them after hours to fix the deployment because the IT ops people's collection of poorly written batch scripts didn't deploy your application correctly. And if you have any time left over, you might get to fudge enough numbers in your project estimate to get some actual coding work approved in the budget.

There are plenty of idiotic and backward-ass things you'll encounter in development shops that haven't caught up with the times, and I can assure you that you'll spend considerably more time doing real development in a shop that does Dev-ops and agile development than you ever will in a shop that does things the old way.

 

[jimmyb]

Utah, Salt Lake City still have to finish my degree so for the next 8 months or so it would need to be around here.

If you're interested in doing hardware design I would strongly suggest not limiting yourself geographically. The job market varies from non-existent to great depending on the location. Try lining something up for when you graduate.

nothing in hardware unless you are an electrical engineer

If you are interested in the position I would apply anyway. Most of the people who I've hired or worked with are electrical engineers; however there have been a handful of CS graduates.

 

[aL Mac]

As far as hardware design and FPGAs... I worked for a small company that would have been interested in someone like you. They worked with software defined radio (making spectrum analyzer and similar products). So... I think there exists the possibility to find someone looking for that.

 

[jimh425]

For an internship, I'd look for a job that wants you to write code at a well known company. Ideally, you'll write commercial quality code, but any code on a major product line is better than working on your own bad designs without proper supervision. At the very least, you'll develop the ability or find out that you don't like it. You do need to work with supervision to grow as much as possible.

If you write solid code, you'll be employable. If you don't, you'll likely be another person with a CS degree that struggles to find work.

I would say follow your interest if you have a solid area of interest, but that doesn't seem to be you at the moment.

 

[pxc]

Where are you looking? The big companies (Intel, AMD, nvidia, TI, Qualcomm, etc) all have lots of internships available. Many smaller ones as well.

Those have related internships for EEs. OP is not an EE.

 

[munkle]

Well I had an interview last week (first ever programming interview), got the internship that actually has double the pay of my last job. I'll be working with software that is for airline companies to sell additional services.

I live 3 minutes from the building which will be nice.

 

[jimmyb]

Those have related internships for EEs. OP is not an EE.

They will typically have EE/CE in the requirements, but in my experience (, having worked several years at one of those companies I listed as an integrated circuit designer,) CS students that apply are not necessarily rejected .

 

[Dogs]

If you don't, you'll likely be another person with a CS degree that struggles to find work.

I would give multiple limbs for that to be the way the world works. So many people make it into the industry writing shit-awful code and the industry rewards them. If you're not at a really advanced shop, there will be at least a few people there making dumb design decisions and writing terrible code, and if you're in some of the slower-to-evolve industries like banking, insurance, financial services or healthcare, expect to see the worst code imaginable touted as 'industry leading'. In my part of the world, there are far more programming jobs than there are competent people to fill them, so lots of us have to suffer through being surrounded by incompetent people.