No Stupid Questions

Getting a job generally has little to do with your degree in most technical fields. The exception is on the research, academia, and science side.

So go to school take classes that are fun, if they happen to align with your career interests great if not just make sure you are building a portfolio of work related to your career goals.

The CS job market is very location specific, so I don't have much advice in that regard.

I've got quite a bit of experience with Linux and I manage a home server, but that probably doesn't differentiate me much.

That said, I have been on my company's rotating interview panel for about a decade now, and while my company's line of work involves a lot of Linux development, I can say that most of our college hires do not possess very much Linux background at all. Sure, they might have used Linux machines for school projects, but rarely do any of them assert to be "experienced" with Linux.

By that, I mean deeper knowledge than just using Bash. If a candidate can tell me why they prefer csh over Bash, or any syntax difference between POSIX sh compared to Bash, that is definitely a distinguishing quality. It speaks of an operator who has enough usage under their belt that they're annoyed by the typical distro's defaults, and more importantly, assessed the available tools, and picked the right tool that works for them.

I cannot understate how valuable it is to us to find a candidate that understands their tooling, especially right out of college. Considering that we assume most new hires have to be brought up to speed over the first few months, a candidate that saves us that effort is at least one rank above their peers.

Deeper functional knowledge comes in other forms as well. It's one thing to know how a C program's main() function is invoked by an OS, but anything which shows a fuller understanding of, say, system architecture and how a timer interrupt leads to a context switch in an assembly ISR, to a returned service call to load an ELF, to a CPU privilege ring change, to crt0, to main(), that is another level entirely.

I've interviewed candidates that had side projects involving retro game disassembly. So maybe they couldn't give me the above level of detail for x86, they could describe the same for MIPS. And that's good enough, because most architectures do roughly the same thing, with a few different semantics and names.

Circling back to managing a server, if you had to deal with PAM, NAT and port forwarding, tunnels and VPNs, compiling from source, or abything like that which is non-trivial, do not sell yourself short. All that stuff is resume material, because if you can relay to an interviewer that you've dealt with real network or machine security tasks, it is distinguishing.

The best part is that you have all of college to learn the CS curriculum, but it's also time that you have to pursue any particular focus that excites you. I've written earlier about how embedded engineers don't really get caught in the hype cycle, so jobs don't suddenly appear then disappear a few years later. If you wanted to do that route, getting started with any microcontroller (eg Arduino, STM32) would help, with a goal to understand all the "magic" that the IDE and compiler are doing. Maybe instead you like das blinkenlights and find yourself drawn to hardware design. It wouldn't be too late to consider a switch to the Computer Engineer (CE) major, so you have a small taste of the EE life.

CS as a field is so large that there are many routes between "I want to work with computers" to a declared major and to a career thereafter. Fortunately, time is on your side; this would be a very different conversation if you were a 4th year college student.

I was in the tech industry for over a decade. Was. Idgaf any more, I left. I was having trouble reconciling morality issues before AI took over. It's not even worth interviewing nowadays.

I'm still doing personal things, like I'm currently planning a NAS Jellyfin server. If companies ever want people like me back, they're gonna have to fork over $$$$$$

I've got quite a bit of experience with Linux and I manage a home server, but that probably doesn't differentiate me much. I'm honestly interested in most things computer related, but don't know of any specific fields to seek out.

But yes, there is a chance in it. This experience can give you a head start into cloud computing technologies, virtualisation, virtual networking, kubernetes etc. For a good many current IT experts this is still a hornet's nest where they don't even dare to stick their nose in, and a lot of others can use it, but never become experts there.

If you have any decent spatial skills, maybe look into GIS. I see positions for GIS developers constantly. More than I ever see positions for GIS Techs or Analysts.

Also if you're in the US, check out BLS.gov, it can help you find similar career fields or specialties that maybe you didn't know about.

Thanks for all your help everyone!

Entirely depends on what kind of college you can get into.

very limited, i know 2 relatives that dint find one job with a cs degree from before the pandemic, and early pandemic. seems like it has been limited for a decade.

As a high school senior self-hosting, you are at least a couple years ahead of the curve in your cohort in this area. Don't write yourself off, even if you are just half-blindingly running scripts for now, keep exploring and tinkering, then learning will come naturally with it.

Assuming you are in the USA, unemployment is low yet few are hiring. Trump's tariffs and meddling in everything has made many businesses across the world hesitant to make any hiring or firing decisions (aside from Silicon Valley tech which thinks AI will do all the jobs). I've encountered several reports like this over the last year, which means if you were a new grad looking for a job right now, in many fields you would struggle to find one.

Definitely ask recruiters for their insight on job market trends, and also start talking to employed people in the fields you have an interest in. Ask if their department recently hired or had layoffs, and other questions to help you decide if that's the kind of work you could see yourself doing in the future given honing your skills through higher education and hobby development.

One kind of career that sounds up your alley based on the skills and interests you described could be systems administration. Those roles will still be necessary for the most part, AI or not.

My take is that right now we're in a software building boom. Making software is a lot cheaper now but maintaining software not as much. I think programmer numbers right now have flatlined but will probably grow in the future as we write more software.

Pivoting to trades is a much safer choice and healthcare will be a guaranteed job security because of demographic changes.

Depends on scholarship/FAFSA.

College still will give you connections. Maybe you will want to look into research positions in CS later after meeting a few professors too.

Also useful to have people your age in your field just around. Could get really into a subfield like robotics or IoT through it.

But if you don't have any scholarship, and you live in US with a $8000/sem prices, then I don't think it's worth loans.

Hope this helps!

To be clear, other options are not different. The majority of college students don't find work in their degree. In 2023, less than 60% were employed at all within 6 months after graduation. Do your best, don't take out a lot of debt, network in person as much as possible. Finding a job is about talking to people and being likable, not having a skillset.

I mean what degree would be better. Obviously if you can hack it medicine is great. law is not btw. its about as good as any degree and most every program has logic requirements which is a nice thing to have. Personally I do think a liberal arts degree is good to broaden your knowledge base. Really the problem is not cs degrees being bad its that bachelors degrees are not all that useful in general any more. Higher cost with less prospects.

Talking from a European perspective, worldwide view here.

We know AI programming is not viable on the professional field. Some companies are not up to date with that yet though.

So I hope when the AI bubble ends in one way or another you will be needed and wanted.

Speaking on a personal level, if you're into computers and not just there for the money you've got an advantage because those only there for the money are often a bit lacking for the job.

Just saw your other answer. I think security and networking is always a hot topic and open. Currently working in exactly those fields. Ama if you wish.

Some advice on choosing a specialization: consider the teachers whose classes you'll need to take. Some teachers are just better at teaching than others, and sometimes even a very highly regarded teacher just won't do it for you. It shouldn't be the only consideration; there will likely come a time where you'll need to take a class taught by someone you just don't work with. But finding someone whose explanations make sense to you, whose style of teaching fits your brain, someone you find it easy to ask questions of, and taking their classes will help you learn a lot more, even if their area of expertise isn't your first choice.

Physics.

Learn RPG.

Like it's old. Old as fuck. But companies still use it.. and the devs that can do the work are dying.. literally .

Trucking company I worked for in 08 had a 5 year plan to get off ibmi.

Talked to the head of their infosec last week. They still use it and still have a 5 year plan...

Medical software company I work for is so desperate for RPG devs they are hiring back folks that retired for contract hourly rates.

The CIO recently said in an all hands that if we knew someone that could RPG dev.. brother cousin neighbor.. to send them their way and the bonus would be larger.

Edit Enterprise RPG (IBM i / AS/400) Software Developer

If you actually care it's a good time. It has never been as easy to learn and get into software engineering as it is today.