r/cscareerquestions • u/Gamerthegamer02x_7 • 6h ago
New Grad Should I just change careers and do something completely unrelated to CS or should I keep pushing (am I close to cracking this job search sh*t)?
Background: I have a BA in CS and graduated last year and am still looking for a job primarily in Software/Web Dev or Data analyst roles. I have 2 years of SWE internship experience and experience as a CS tutor at my college as well as being the President of a CS club on my college campus when I attended and have made some ok projects but I still feel like I need to make something bigger/better to learn more and have even more to talk about in interviews.
Context: I've been looking for a CS Job for slightly over a year now this coming month and I have learned a lot in this job search process. I have gone through cycles of being depressed about my job search efforts and then gaining energy again to keep going by trying new approaches again and learned how to go from getting literally ZERO interviews for like 2/3 months to actually securing consistent interviews at least like 1-3 a week for a period of time before I recently went on a 3 week break from applying to stuff because I was getting burnt out of doing a lot of interviews back to back every week or so without a ton of time between each one to improve upon faults of the previous ones or work on anything else aside from prepping for interviews. With all this said, I am once again starting to apply to jobs again trying to be consistent about doing a little every day but after a talk with a friend who got a degree in business and was also struggling finding a job for a short while, they told me that should pivot to get a decent paying job and leverage my technical background to try for non-CS roles to just get something, anything for the time being because clearly the job market is not in my favor and whatever companies are looking for in terms of technical proficiency that I'm not quite there yet and that companies clearly don't want to train people anymore. I somewhat agree with them that while I have gotten better at reviewing on my DSA and working on more projects, I still feel lacking a little in my technical proficiency in Dev skill level and that this has been the #1 barrier in competing with other candidates when interviewing (I have just said "I'm sorry I don't know that" a couple times in some interviews before and I feel like that's a death sentence to my odds of getting a given job but idk). I have heavily considered pivoting to IT work of some form or fashion but it seems as though entry level IT jobs are also flooded atm and all of them require some form of CISCO or Comptia certification to be seriously considered but even then, it doesn't guarantee you a job unless you show interest in some related project outside of the certification too. Another thing I've considered is pivoting to some other field/specialty of CS like Cyber, Networking, or AI/ML specialist but I have limited experience in all of these.
I still enjoy CS and learning new things in the field otherwise I wouldn't have committed to the degree but I feel as though CS grads have to jump through so many extra hoops compared to most job seekers and at the end of the day I just want to work a job with decent pay and go home right now in my life. This brings me to my last thing which is, should I just keep trying for SWE/data analyst roles or should I just try something completely new and unrelated to CS at all to just get whatever random job I can get that pays good enough?
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u/domomdomon 4h ago
My blunt opinion just based off of this post is that you are not good at interviews. Your resume is working since you’re getting callbacks. At this point you should invest some time into mock interviews with professionals in the field to pinpoint interview weaknesses.
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u/HappyIrishman633210 6h ago
Did data analyst roles become CS roles at some point? (Old man voice) back in my day they were math and statistics roles.
The easiest way to get into more technical roles is to start in a role anywhere and use your skills to add value. The market is really bad in pretty much everything right now though.