r/cscareerquestions • u/foreversingle- • 12h ago

Student What is a career in CS like?

Im going into uni next year and choosing between CS and mechatronics engineering. The point of this post is not to see what the job market/employability is, but rather to gauge my interest in this field.

What sort of work do you guys do? What would I do outside of uni curriculum? I heard a lot about building personal projects, but what does that entail? Creating an app as a hobby for example? What are some career/job options and what sort of work do you do in said job? Whether you're a student or grad, whats your daily life looking like?

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u/Yoiiru 10h ago edited 10h ago

Depressing tbh, and now with AI it's existential depression. I don't code much these days, mostly AI prompting, or debugging (and then management going "why can't AI do this? Why do you need to debug manually???")

If you're super passionate about CS and AI, then you'll be frustrated with the bureaucracy and management and, unless you work for yourself or smaller company, chances are many (often stupid and technically ignorant) decisions come top down. Project managers that ping you 3x a day on "is this done yet?" and then "status update?". Your internal business clients don't know what they want and you have to figure out what they want and tell them. Really depends on the company.

I agree with the comments that direct towards the engineering route. The self-learning bar for pure software development has lowered a lot with AI. An education that is adjacent to but also transitional to CS might be more valuable. We still don't know what the market will look like in 4-5 years when you graduate.

Many of your questions are "depends on the company". I heard a lot about "personal projects" too back then but I never did any. The school projects were enough for me. A lot of companies don't care about your passion projects unless it's directly transferable to work related skills. For reference I work in finance.

Overall for me: Pay is decent, job stress is average. For the average guy, it's an average job to pay the bills. As long as you have some endurance in you and like it enough it's alright.

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u/Proper_Knowledge6361 6h ago

I find that looking for smaller companies that aren't a startup backed by venture capital and is actually profitable and stable is the best option right now. I found a very small company that had been around for 20+ years and they need to hire in new people as a few are about to retire but want the company to continue without selling it and making everyone lose their job. That's the jackpot honestly.