I studied CS. It actually depends on where you want to go. For web dev, I offer the following advice. It's much more important to be able to handle big old-ish

I studied CS. It actually depends on where you want to go. For web dev, I offer the following advice. It's much more important to be able to handle big old-ish codebases than it is to be able to handle all CS theory. Though, I'm sure it's different with FAANG. With FAANG, all that matters is passing the interview ;-) I have almost never needed my CS theory. It's nice to know but not really applicable when you need to extend an ACL (security permissions for users) or refactor the i18n export function. What is needed is understanding how to quickly navigate in a codebase while touching few to many files (depending on the task). How to get this experience? I don't know, I studied computer science. I think an internship is best? Perhaps contributing to an open-source project? Perhaps creating your own side project? I'd think along those lines. Though it could be that other HN'ers have a totally different perspective. I'm curious what they have to say.