No-one expects a fresh college grad to be a rockstar dev. The few places that do, probably have highly specialized recruitment pipelines, and look for people wi

No-one expects a fresh college grad to be a rockstar dev. The few places that do, probably have highly specialized recruitment pipelines, and look for people with the "correct" features and milestones, like monitoring people that have participated in math / informatics olympiads, that have gone to the "correct" schools, and have been mentored by important figures. Those places are rare. But for the majority, my tip would be: - Get comfortable with a couple of languages, learn good style, and get familiar with the toolkit. - Learn the fundamentals of CS. - Commit to some side projects. - Seek out internships/work experience - Do fairly well in school. - Learn teamwork and soft skills. I don't think any single/individual point above is enough to signal "awesome developer", but the sum of them will surely correlate with high potential.