Faked My Way Through a CS Degree — How Do I Recover Fast?

Posted by Flat_Finger_8594@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 12 comments

Hi Reddit,

I’m in a pretty stressful situation and could really use some advice.

I’m currently in New Zealand on a work visa, and if I don’t secure a job in my field before it expires, I may have to leave the country. I have about 1 year and 10 months left, so time is limited.

The problem is—I graduated with a degree in Software Engineering, but I don’t actually have solid coding skills. Throughout my degree, I relied heavily on AI tools to complete assignments and tests. Instead of properly learning, I took shortcuts and didn’t build the foundation I should have. Looking back, I basically wasted that opportunity.

Now it’s catching up to me. I haven’t applied for internships or jobs because I’m honestly scared of interviews—I don’t feel confident in my knowledge, and I’m worried I’ll get exposed and rejected.

But I’m ready to change that. I’m fully committed to learning now, no matter how hard it gets—even if it means long hours and sacrificing sleep. I just don’t know where to start or how to realistically catch up on everything I missed (programming languages, APIs, backend, etc.) in a short time.

If anyone has been in a similar situation or has advice on how to quickly build real skills and become job-ready, I’d really appreciate your guidance.

Thanks in advance.

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owp4dd1w5a0a@reddit

Okay, obvious from your post you recognize you cheated yourself. I went harp on that. However, there’s a silver lining…

There’s a million Jr coders out there that did the same thing you did and they’re getting jobs. First thing you need to do is secure employment. Lots of novices are using AI these days without really knowing what they’re doing and getting away with it. I would just concede that this is your starting place and just go get a job that doesn’t mind you being an AI whisperer. If you need to, employ AI as a mentor and study to pass the interviews, not perform well on the job.

Second, don’t sacrifice your sleep! You don’t need to to learn it and nothing is so important that you should sacrifice your health and wellbeing to do it. I never sacrificed sleep after college and I did really well becoming a lead big data architect after 10 years in the industry and retiring after 20 years.

Third, the way to learn software honestly is to build lots of stuff on your own. While you’re young and don’t have many family responsibilities you could take 1-2 hours a day to work on a side project for learning programming and still have time to fit a bit of exercise and a good dinner into your schedule. You could also choose to just dedicate 4-6 hours every Saturday morning to said programming project: if you wake up at 7am, make your coffee, and get to coding right away you could be done at 1 and have the rest of every Saturday afternoon to recover - hang with friends, go on nature walks, do some fun exercise, take a nap, etc. I’d recommend always keeping at least 1 day a week (Sunday) totally programming free or you’ll for sure burn yourself out. But that’s ~16 hours per week you could be putting into a FUN programming side project that would probably teach you more practical skills in 3-6 months than most people get out of their 4 year undergrad degrees.

I am not telling you to do something I haven’t done. I did stuff like this my first 5 years in the industry and it worked out great for me. I learned a ton through my self directed projects in a time before LLMs were even a thing and it enabled me to get some pretty well-paying high-level jobs throughout my career.

aqua_regis@reddit

You even cheated here by letting AI write your post. You are cooked.

C_Pala@reddit

Dude so dependent of LLM that even the post is written with it.

Jahonay@reddit

You used AI to make this post.

My advice would be to think if you've actually decided to stop cutting corners. Ask yourself what it would take for you to start doing work on your own, and do it.

If you still have text books and syllabuses, hold on to them, don't throw them away. Keep any materials you still have from your courses, use them as reference materials.

But you're not the first person to waste their time at college, and you will not be the last. Plenty of us went to college when we were not ready for it.

If I were you, I would try not to be sorry for yourself, just start doing stuff. I wanted to go into web development, so I chose the Odin project as an online course, that was probably one of the best ways to learn for me. Recently I've been trying to learn laravel and laracasts is really helpful. I think automate the boring stuff is a great book from what I recall. I also like the book the pragmatic programmer. But no matter what, just start, dedicate your free time to it, and stop wasting time. Start learning, start building projects, start making dumb mistakes and keep going anyway. Dont turn to AI every time you run into a challenging problem, read documentation, watch tutorials, practice with intention. If you spend hours playing video games a day like I used to, stop. Either quit cold turkey like I did, or do a couple hours a week. Spend the bulk of your time learning.

If you don't already, I would start keeping a daily journal. Even if you barely use it, just try to keep in practice of using it. It's a great way to track your progress, and it can help you stay accountable. You might even want to try a daily coding practice, like upload something to github everyday for 100 days, just commit to the work.

Lastly, apply for internships. If you suck, you suck, just try your best to do well and to improve every day, be open to criticism, and just move past it. Don't let your ego prevent you from doing what you want to do.