My Honest Advice to Computer Science Majors.

You're not getting what you want out of your CS degree, your career, or your life because you're trying to want too many things at the same time. The other day, I spoke with a mentee who had just joined my program last month. She said, "Phil, I'm really worried about my CS degree. It hasn't actually taught me how to be a developer, and this is my last year. I feel like I'm cooked. I don't think I'll get hired." So, I asked her a simple question. What does the rest of your year look like? She started listing things off. She needs to graduate this summer. She's trying to find an internship. She's taking six classes this semester, plus an extra class in the summer just to graduate on time. She has multiple vacations planned with her boyfriend and her family. And then she casually added, "Oh, and I just joined your mentorship." At that point, I had to stop her. I said, "Are you serious? You signed up for my mentorship with this schedule?" To be clear, I respected the intent. She was taking action. That already put her ahead of most people. But everything in her life was crammed. No space, no margin, no clear priority. She wasn't failing because she lacked intelligence or motivation. She was overwhelmed because she was trying to do everything at once. Over the next few weeks, she met multiple times with me, the coaches, and my team. Together, we built a real strategic road map. not a motivational plan, but an honest one. A plan that would get her through graduation, protect focused build time, prepare her to apply in the fall, and dramatically increase her chances of landing her first role. But that plan came with a cost, trade-offs, sacrifices, and to her credit, she understood that immediately because real progress doesn't come from doing more. It comes from choosing what matters now and letting the rest wait. So, here's the thing. You need to make trades in different seasons of your life. Let me explain. You want straight A's. You want to never feel stressed. You want to keep your weekends. You want a social life. You want to play games. You want to sleep. You want internships. You want to be job ready. You want to feel confident right now. But here's the hard truth. Most people aren't willing to make tradeoffs. I've been there myself. And this mentee, she ended up in this situation because for the last few years, she didn't make those trade-offs either. Not because she was lazy, not because she didn't care, but because it's easier to delay hard decisions than to confront them. The difference now is timing. It's late, but it's not too late. And if she follows the plan, truly commits to the trade-offs we laid out, and protects what matters most, she's going to be just fine. Actually, expect great things. So, in this video, I'm going to break down the real problem and the way you frame the trades you have to make in different seasons of your life, specifically as a CS student who feels cooked. And if you don't know who I am, let me be clear about one thing. I'm not a motivational speaker. In fact, I'm literally looking at the outline of this video right now because I'm an average speaker at best. But I think you'll still get value from this. Not because I'm inspiring, but because I've already lived the phase you're in. I've been through the I feel behind phase. The why is everyone else faster than me phase. The am I even built for this phase. I didn't skip any of it. And I'm telling you this honestly, the only reason I'm on the other side today is because I finally started making intentional tradeoffs. That's why you see me in those day in the life videos working from home, operating as a senior developer or tech lead across multiple projects. I get to drop my son off every morning without rushing. I get to pick him up, too. I get to play Diablo I with my best friend sometimes. And I even get to sit here and make videos like this. None of that happened by accident. It happened because I made trades in my time, my focus, and my priorities. That's it. So, that's the moral of the story. Everything has trade-offs. Everything. This is where most people mess it up. They only look at the price, never the payout. If I had focused only on the price it took to get here, especially starting late at 30, I wouldn't be here today. I wasted most of my 20s. drugs, chasing girls, avoiding responsibility. If I had stayed stuck on the cost of turning my life around, the long nights, the missed weekends, the feeling of being behind, I would have quit before anything compounded. And the same thing applies to my mentees and those who succeed in our community. People look at them now and think they got lucky, that they somehow magically landed jobs in a brutal market. What they don't see is what it took just to get interviews, let alone offers, the sacrifices, the boring months, the trades no one clap for. So before you decide something isn't worth it, ask yourself this. Are you looking at the price or the payout? So when someone looks at a cracked student and goes, I can't believe they're landing internships or job offers, they're just looking at the offer letter. They're just looking at the success and thinking, "These guys are making it look easy." That's not the case. They're not looking at the nights that kid didn't go out, sacrificing the fun they could be having. They're not looking at the weekends they spent building instead of consuming. A full app built, tested, deployed, and all the countless weekends spent just putting in work. They're not looking at the reps could be upwards of 500 applications. And if you say, "I wouldn't make that trade." Well, that's totally fine. But when you won't get that same outcome as that crack kid, that's the trade-off. So, let me give you a frame that makes this impossible to unsee. I was thinking about this because I see CS students shopping for a career like they're shopping for the perfect laptop. They want lightweight, powerful, cheap, silent, long battery, huge screen, and indestructible. And they want it today. But you can't have all that because some of those requirements literally contradict each other. And college is the same. A lot of you are trying to build a perfect college experience where you get top grade, zero anxiety, a packed social life, 8 hours of sleep, a relationship, gym, side hustle, and also become employable as a software engineer all at once. But it's not going to happen. It's structurally impossible. Yeah, you can get some of those, but not all of those. So, you're going to have to make trades. And the reason you feel cooked is because you haven't accepted that yet. You're still trying to win at everything at the same time. And that keeps you in what I call a decision limbo. It happens when you want the outcome, but you refuse to choose the price. You want the end result. a perfect body, a perfect relationship, perfect grades, a six-f figureure junior role before graduation that's also fully remote, but you don't pick one. And even worse, you don't accept the pain that comes with any of them. Because every result has a cost. A great body costs discomfort, consistency, and boredom. A strong relationship costs hard conversations, and compromise. Top grades cost isolation and sustained focus. A highpaying junior role costs steep work, delayed gratification, and saying no to a lot of things other people say yes to. You can't skip that part. When you refuse to choose a price, you stay stuck dreaming about results you're never actually paying for. And that's how you lose time. So, you start drifting with just that goal in mind. And drifting feels like this. I'll build projects after midterms. I'll learn interviews next summer. I'll start a portfolio when I'm better. I'll apply when I feel ready. The thing is, you will never feel ready. Eventually, you will just run out of time. So, now let me give you the hard truth about the CS degree. The CS degree is not a job. It's not even job training. It's a foundation. Actually, it's not even a foundation. It's an introduction. It teaches you concepts. It teaches you vocabulary. It teaches you mental models. It teaches you how to think. It does not automatically produce the things you need as a software engineer which are your portfolio, your deployed app, full stack end to end with users, your resume with work experience that you need to stack by doing things for people for free or open source. Your algorithm skills, your ability to speak well and network because that part is on you. You might be thinking, "Damn, Phil, this path is hard." But I don't say that to scare you. The truth is, every job, even in other industries, is hard if you want to be exceptional. Anything worth it is going to come with a bigger sacrifice, a bigger degree of pain that you need to endure. So, I say all this to relieve you because when CS degree students graduate and I've been seeing videos on YouTube or Instagram saying they are cooked, I want to tell them all that the degree didn't fail you. You just thought the degree was the whole plan. You just thought that that degree was your band-aid to the pain you believe you could skip over. It's not. It's barely half. And the other half is what you do outside of class. the stuff I just told you about. And if you're not doing that other half, you're making the worst trade, the unconscious trade. This is the one that kills CS students because you lose the most valuable resource. You sacrifice time and you don't get skill. You grind assignments. You never built anything you actually own. You study to pass exams, but you never practiced shipping. You do group projects, but you hide and do the easiest part so you don't look dumb. And then you graduate with I completed courses, but you don't graduate with I can build. You don't graduate with proof. You don't graduate with the confidence and the skill that should have come with that degree. You just feel cooked. You paid the price of time, but you didn't collect the payout. So now let's talk about the most common trades in college. This is what it really comes down to. Are you a consumer or a builder? Because consumers feel productive, but builders become employable. If you want a clear breakdown of how to become a builder, how to get hired in 2026, and how to build real proof that actually makes you employable, watch last week's video. In that video, I lay out exactly how to trade time for real skill and real evidence instead of endlessly consuming content. And if you don't just want information but accountability, if you want structured classes that help you build fullscale applications end to end, learn the same AI workflows senior developers actually use and develop skills that translate directly to getting hired. You can check out the link in the description for my mentorship. We don't just build here, we get hired. We create future senior developers. All right, back to the video. So, as I was saying, consumer versus builder. Let's talk about it. Consumers collect information. Builders collect evidence. Consumers say, "I'm learning React." Builders say, "Here's the repo. Here's the URL. Here's what broke. Here's how I fixed it." And hiring doesn't pay for vibes. Hiring pays for outcomes. Consumers build tutorial projects. They copy a whole repo they ripped off from a course or video. Builders, they turn out apps with real users on it. They solve real problems. They ultimately get hired because they built proof that they can do the actual work of software engineering. Because in 2026, the ones who get hired are people who can ship, people who can debug, people who can own systems, people who can explain trade-offs. That is the job. You need to be able to do all four of those. And to build up all that skill, it requires either time or a whole lot of pain because if you want to do it quicker, it's going to require quite a bit of sacrifice. And everything else is a subset. Now, the trade-offs get sharper in 2026 because of AI. AI didn't remove the need for skill. It multiplies it. If you have the skill, the fundamentals, knowledge of system design, and have built a couple of apps end to end, AI makes you legitimately faster. If you don't have skill, AI just makes you feel fast. And that is the trap because as a CS student, you can use AI to complete assignments without learning. You can prompt your way through homework. You can copy paste the solution. you can get the grade and still be cooked. Because interviews don't care that you got it to compile. They care if you can reason. They care if you can explain why it works. They care if you can debug when it doesn't. So, here's the big brother rule from me to you. AI should accelerate your thinking, not replace it. Use AI like a spotter, not like a forklift. Use AI for explaining concepts you don't get. breaking down an error message, summarizing docs, comparing approaches and trade-offs, generating test cases so you can validate your own code, and do not use AI for core logic you can't explain, architecture you didn't design, features you didn't attempt because if you can't teach the code you copy and pasted, you didn't learn it. You just borrowed it. And borrowed skills disappear the second you're under pressure. Please refer to my last video on exactly how I would use AI or how I would learn programming in 2026 to gain the actual skills you would need to get hired in 2026. And here's the example I want burned into your brain. Let's say you're building a simple API. You hit an O bug. This is what not to do. Don't tell your C-pilot or cursor AI to fix my O. Yeah, it will split out middleware, token logic, database queries. It probably will work. You will feel unstoppable. But then an interviewer will ultimately ask you, "Walk me through why middleware order matters here." And you freeze because you didn't walk through it. You skip the rep. So this is what you should do instead. You struggle for 20 minutes. You read the stack trace. You read the documentation. You log the request. You notice the token is missing on protected routes. You suspect middleware order. Now, you are still going to use AI here. Why wouldn't you? It's a great tech that will speed up your learning and ultimately 10x you. So, you ask AI, explain why middleware order affects JWT and how to verify it. How AI confirms your reasoning. So, now the rep sticks. Now, you're getting stronger. And that's the trade. That's how AI can make you faster. But you still have to pay a bit of price for understanding. So, now let's talk about fear. This is where you're lying to yourself. Most students overestimate the downside. They think, "If I fail, I'm done. If I'm behind, I'll never catch up. If I apply and get rejected, I'm exposed. If I look dumb, it's over." No, it's not over. You don't die. You get feedback. That's the thing. College is literally the safest environment you will ever have to fail. This is the gym. This is where you build scars on easy mode. And the upside of you doing the real work is bigger than you think. Because if you graduate with a degree plus real projects, interview reps, proof you can shift, you're not cooked. You're competitive. Actually, you will have beat 99% of the entire CS degree students. Now, here's something that will sound annoying, but it's true. All the things, the results of having that six-f figureure job, the remote job, or even a simple internship, all of it is on the other side of the fear of uncertainty and the time spent within that uncertain period. That's it. Nothing is guaranteed except death and taxes. So, you have this innate fear that your project that you build won't be good enough. And that time you have to pay to spend building that project. Well, that same fear is keeping you from spending that time. And so, most people refuse that price. They won't pay because they don't know how long it takes. They don't know how many weekends it will cost. They don't know if it will pay off. So, they do nothing. And doing nothing feels safe until graduation hits. And then panic shows up. Now, I want to tell you a personal story. When I was learning during my boot camp, I treated my mistakes like they were fatal. I was terrified of looking stupid. I would avoid asking questions. I would avoid pushing code. I would avoid submitting PRs because I didn't want comments. I would study instead because studying was private. And actually, this very habit carried on into my first developer job as well. But this time around, I kind of had no choice but to show my work to my seniors. Because as little of a contribution I did make to the company, my work still had to be shown in public. So I had no choice. I had to ship. So I shipped something ugly. I mean, I simply didn't have the skills to make it better. But regardless, I did my kid commits. Yes, it broke. I fixed it. Then it broke again. Then I fixed it again. And the wildest part, I didn't get fired. And the more questions I asked, the more I showed that I was willing to stay in the trenches, not give up, and actually make things better. The more I learned, that's when my seniors started investing in me. That's when real mentorship began. I owe a huge part of my career to my mentor, Miguel, the first senior developer I ever worked with. I absorbed the way he thought, the way he approached problems, the way he wrote code. I learned back-end development because of him. But here's the part most people miss. He wouldn't have taken me under his wing if I hadn't failed constantly right in front of him and still shown up the next day. My failures gave me the right questions to ask. My failures exposed where I was weak. My failures showed me exactly what I needed to work on next. Those failures are what eventually allowed me to become a senior developer and later a tech lead at multiple seven and 8 figure companies. And those same failures are the reason I can pass this knowledge on today. They're why I can mentor others, why I can build this community, and why I can help my people get paid. So that's the thing. When I failed, nobody died. No one kicked me out. And the world didn't end. All the fear was just fear. It was like holding your breath because you think a mistake is going to poison you. You think that mistake is going to cost you your future. And then you finally breathe and realize you're fine. That's what building again and again does for you. building full stack end to end especially whatever apps you do create from simple to difficult from a landing page a dashboard to a full-scale app with off and backend systems all that proves you survived and once you know you survive you stop overprotecting your ego you start collecting reps now here's the practical blueprint college version of everything I said to you if you want to stop feeling cooked do this pick one stack for 6 to 12 months. Ignore the noise that you need to learn this or that. Just pick one. My recommendation is Typescript with React and Node.js. Stop stack hopping. Depth beats novelty. Then build one full scale app end to end. Not a demo, not a toy. One real product with the following: authentication, database, CRUD, permissions, error handling, deployment, logging, basic performance awareness. Treat school like your foundation. Treat that project like your job training because that's the deal. And yes, you will sacrifice. You sacrifice comfort now so you don't sacrifice your future later. That is the trade. So, if you want to follow the plan I just laid out and do it with my team and me, you can find the link in the description below. We'll teach you how to build a real full-scale application from end to end. But more importantly, we'll teach you how to become employable. How to make smart, efficient tradeoffs with your time, no matter where you're starting from, no matter where you are in your life. If that sounds like what you need, apply for the mentorship. I'd love to work with you. And then there will come a time sooner than later when you start thinking, what if I'm behind? Good. Behind is normal. Behind is where everyone starts. I had a day one, my turning point. Miguel had a day one. And that mentee I mentioned earlier, the one who just joined my mentorship, she had her day one just a few weeks ago. Her turning point just started. Every single one of us felt behind at one point. But that's the part people miss. We only felt behind temporarily, but eventually we made the hard trade. So hear me clearly. If you're feeling behind right now, if you feel cooked, if you feel like college failed you or led you in the wrong direction, you still have a choice and you can make it today. Make the trade. Be conscious of what you're giving up. Be conscious of what you're getting in return and then keep going until it works. If you have moments of setback, ask yourself, did you die? No. Did you figure it out? Not yet. You're not dead. So try again. Because if it doesn't work, it changes nothing. But if it does work, it changes everything. Work, work, work, work. Nothing. Work, work, work, work. And then you add that extra work. Still nothing. Then work, work. Boom. You gain momentum. You gain the upside that you paid for. That's how you stop being cooked. That's how you become a programmer. It has nothing to do with a degree. It has nothing to do with a certificate. It has everything to do with you and how you spend your time and your ability to make trades in seasons of your life. So, what's next? You already know. In fact, comment below what truly is next for you. Tell me that you are starting today. Tell me what's been keeping you stuck in the same place. Write it in the comment. Then tell me after watching this video what you're willing to give up, what you're willing to trade, and finally tell me clearly what goal you're committing to for 2026. It's still early this year. We have time. If you use it intentionally, make that comment your accountability northstar. If you do that, I'll come back, read it, and give you my honest advice to help you break into tech. And when I started this YouTube journey with my friend Minnie, we had a simple motto. Let's create a thousand senior developers before this is all said and done. I truly believe we can do that. So make the trade. And remember, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Coding save lives.

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