Programming anxiety, what do I do?

Student Lounge College Life
1

<p>I interviewed for internships at six software companies and got rejected from all of them. Ever since then I've had really bad programming anxiety. Every time there is a bug in my code I keep thinking things like "why do I suck so bad" and "why did I major in computer science." How can I stop thinking these things? It makes me really slow at debugging code.</p>

<p>For reference I interviewed at Google, Microsoft, Quora, Sift Science, LinkedIn, and Dropbox. I applied for a lot more but a lot of them rejected me without an interview. Now I don't have an internship for this summer but at least I am going to a good graduate school.</p>

2

<p>A lot of those are big name companies where competition is huge. Try local companies that are not so well known.</p>

3

<p>They didn’t reject you because you are a bad programmer, they rejected you because they have way more qualified applicants than they can offer internships to.</p>

4

<p>Okay, don’t be offended, but I actually laughed out loud when I read the names of the companies you applied to. At first I was ready to feel sorry for you and give you a pep talk, but…how can I explain this?</p>

<p>Companies like that get jillions of applicants for internships. Of those jillions, about two thousand applicants meet the minimum qualifications. Of those two thousand, probably 50-100 would be ideal candidates for a handful of open internships. So even among the ultra-qualified, only a minority actually get the internship. My magnitudes (pop, POP!) may be off but the idea remains the same. It’s kind of a crapshoot, and on top of that, those are like the HYPSM’s of internships for CS. Think of those people who run races in the Olympics. The guy who wins becomes famous and goes on talk shows, and the guy who is one measly second slower than him is a nobody. At the highest levels of ability, talent, skill, etc., you’ll often see that returns to ability scale exponentially. The fastest guy is a multi-millionaire, the next-fasted guy makes $40,000 a year.</p>

<p>What I’m saying is, being turned down for an internship like that shouldn’t sting because it’s not an insult. Stop feeling down in the dumps, don’t take it as a criticism. Next time around, apply for more “safety” internships. It doesn’t mean you’re not good.</p>