I used to think I was smart in math. Took AP Calc AB and BC. Got A's in both. Felt pretty good about myself for a minute.
Then I met the physics people. The ones doing the hard stuff. Quantum, electromagnetism, all that. Yall just be cracked. It's not even the same sport. You see how they think and you realize you were never that guy. You were just good at memorizing patterns and plugging into formulas.
Real math is different. Real math is sitting with a problem for hours and not flinching. It's seeing the abstraction underneath. I don't have that. I never did.
And then I went to college for cs and honestly I feel like I didn't even learn much there. Everything I actually use, everything that stuck, was self taught. Reading docs. Building stuff. Breaking stuff. Googling for hours. That's where the real learning happened.
Most of these classes the professors don't even teach. They're there to collect a paycheck on top of their research grants. You're paying 50k a year to read the textbook yourself and figure it out. They show up, throw slides on the wall, give you a problem set, and dip. That's the deal.
It is what it is. Everything is money at the end of the day. The school's a business. The degree's a receipt. The knowledge you actually got, you got on your own time.
Life's a scam. We just trying to survive out here.
And let me tell you about my senior project. Final semester. Capstone. They put us in groups and said go build something.
I went to a state school so I already knew the bar wasn't crazy high. Most people weren't really studious. That's fine. I get it. Not everyone's locked in. But this is the 4th year of a computer science degree. The last semester. You're about to graduate and walk into a job with this title attached to your name.
My partner didn't know what a terminal was. Didn't know how to open one. Didn't know how to cd into a folder. Didn't know what git was. Couldn't clone the repo. Couldn't push. Couldn't pull. Nothing.
First I was in disbelief. Like there's no way. You sat through four years of classes. You wrote code at some point. How? How did you make it here?
Then I got frustrated. Because now it's on me. I gotta carry this whole thing. I gotta build it and pretend they helped. I gotta sit there and teach them the basics that should've been day one of freshman year.
Then I got disappointed. Not even at them really. At the whole thing. At the school. At the system that let someone get a cs degree without ever touching a terminal. At the professors who passed them along. At the classes that didn't catch this. What were we even doing for 4 years?
Then I gave up. Built the whole thing myself. Put their name on it. Submitted. Moved on.
That's when I realized the degree means nothing. It's just paper. People graduate next to you who can't do the most basic thing in the field. And the employers know. That's why they make you do leetcode and take homes and 5 round interviews. Because the degree isn't proof of anything anymore.
It is what it is. We out here.