I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring"

I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.

I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.

It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.

It’s crazy how variable experiences of that time are across geography; I was living in a high-growth city at the time (where I went to undergrad) and we basically went from 30% Y/Y growth to 20% for a couple years, so we never really even felt the recession. I didn’t even have a CS degree but they were hiring anyone with a pulse and PHP skills.

Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.

Dang that's a tough road to persevere through especially in '08. How did you get your big break?

Found a job through a connection I made during that four months and hung onto it for a few years to get some good experience, even though it sucked.

Moved to a bigger city from there and started trading up better positions with that experience.

Doing pretty good now, I'm a team lead at a company building some pretty cool stuff.

Still feels like if I had 2 or 3 internships during university I'd have had a lot smoother sailing. But who knows?

It definitely makes me think Software Development should be taught more like a trade with apprenticeships than anything else though.