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maheroku

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How Google Hires 11 years ago

I think the best way to get over that is to make something on your own that is so great that everyone wants to hire you without even doing an interview!

The funny thing is that you may not even need a job once you do something great on your own :)

If you are short of money, you can always get a simple part time job to survive.

That is why I specified it depends, it depends on personalities, the school, your goals in life and much more. My university for instance was terrible, I think I have spent 30% of my time filling out lab reports because they were so many! Took many courses that made no sense and that I had no interests in. I think perhaps 10 Software Engineering courses were plain repetition, some professors didn't even speak English nor knew what the heck was going on, We didn't get the chance to code much, most concepts were outdated, The network opportunity was very poor, I can keep going lool. I actually had to unlearn many things when I started working.

I'm a type of person that likes to get information and knowledge only when needed so it made absolutely no sense to learn stuffs and fill my head with knowledge without having a specific goal to reach. If my goal was to build an OS, then I would read about OS Kernels and start experimenting otherwise it's irrelevant to me.

For my personality, my goals in life and much more, school was a complete waste and a big regret. So suggesting it to someone else without knowing their goals or personality is dangerous because it could ruin them like it did to many.

I personally think it depends and here is why:

For me University was my biggest mistake ever and if I could turn the clock around, I would not go to university. It took my most energetic and creative years and put them into useless work. I spent 6 years in University because I started in a terrible one and had to leave and go to Canada to get better education and still I think the University that I went to was terrible and ended up eating all my money, energy and time for a completely useless degree that no one even cares about. My degree was in Software Engineering and I believe if it was something else, it would have been 10 times worse. Maybe I could have used University to build a great Network but due to my introvert nature, I don't think I have succeeded and besides the city where I was in had an ok network.

So all that to say that it depends in my opinion: If you are an introvert and your goal is to be a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist or a researcher or anything similar then University is a great choice. If you are however an introvert and only care about making cool stuffs then be prepared that school will take most of your time and energy and put it into something that has no value or meaning. If you are an extrovert and your goal is to be an entrepreneur then take a major that doesn’t require much work and spend your time building networks and making stuffs.

That’s the way I see it, I may be wrong but my personal life experience has led me to believe that.

I actually have discovered this about myself recently. I have left my full time job not long ago so I can start a business and initially was very optimistic about the future and I was taking my time in every task and enjoying the moment but when my worries have increased I started envisioning worst case scenarios in my head and that's when I started getting things done much quicker. Looking back I also think I did well in school thanks to my worries but that also made me lose hair due to stress lol, so it's not always good to worry and a good balance is perfect.

I'm building my product on top of Firebase using AngularFire and this news worries me so much. At first I thought it could be great but after reading all the comments here I'm not sure what to think anymore. The CEO is saying that they will continue developing the platform but apparently history shows that such promises are not always kept. Firebase is such an awesome product that it will be really terrible for Google to shut it down. I come from a Ruby On Rails and SQL background and as soon as I saw an app running with Angular and Firebase, I fell in love right away. I have already put too much time and effort into making my product with Angular and Firebase that it is too late to go back now, I will have to take the risk. Honestly if Google shuts it down, I'm sure they will release the source code at the very least. I think I'm going to be optimistic and hope that Google makes the right choice.