As someone who has hired a ton of developers, including many straight out of college, let me offer a bit of a perspective of what you've bought. Your programmi

As someone who has hired a ton of developers, including many straight out of college, let me offer a bit of a perspective of what you've bought. Your programming abilities are extremely likely to be shit. Unless you've been programming since you were 12, the programming you've done for your CS degree has not prepared you to write code in the industry and, in fact, has probably given you a ton of bad habits that will need to be broken when you get your first job. Just an example, but I find that fresh college grads don't commit/push their work nearly as often as they need to. I find that school encourages a mentality of spending all the time you have making it as good as you can make it when it's far more valuable in the industry to share your work with coworkers as early in the process as possible. I have to watch our new-grad hires like a hawk or they'll hold their story until code freeze and commit at the last minute and make QA's job harder. The good news is that you've been taught a framework for thinking about how computer programs perform as the size of data gets huge. The bad news is that jobs where you're writing the kind of code that deals with huge data are few and far between. Sure, we've got more data than ever these days, but we're using libraries and products that have already handled much of the CS work. To echo another poster, between a CS grad, a bootcamp grad and someone with a year of professional experience, I'll take the professional experience every time. The bootcamp grad has gaping holes in his skill set...I interviewed 8 of these at a hiring event and while each of them could talk intelligently about the 4 technologies they'd been taught, not one of them had even heard the term "load balancer" or could even guess what it might be used for. The CS grad has useful knowledge, but I can teach the small portion of a CS curriculum that's applicable to the jobs I hire for. Big-O notation is a pretty simple concept and it takes two seconds to look it up for the data structures we use. And has been said elsewhere, in the real world, n is usually pretty small and the constants matter. And yes, I realize the irony of saying that because of Google, a product that required a ton of CS knowledge to create, a formal CS background is less important. Only the one with experience isn't starting from near-zero. And that's alright...I'm firmly in the camp that believes that college shouldn't be a trade school. It has value in and of itself and shouldn't be expected to teach the skills that are needed on the job. But that also means that it doesn't give you that leg up that you seem to be expecting it to. Your degree will get you in the door, but mostly because our industry is starved for talent right now, but you'll only be valuable once you've gotten real-world experience.