No I ended up going to a university where CS was probably the smallest major on campus. But I worked my ass off to learn CS on my own. The tests wouldn’t have predicted the outcome I’ve been able to enjoy based on scores I received.
I didn’t do well on my SATs back in the 90s. I’m not a good standardized test taker and I was working at a dialup internet provider while in high school, probably 30 hours a week. It left next to no time for studying for the SATs. As a result I got pretty bad scores because I was perpetually exhausted.
Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8.
I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.
A function that both opens a file and does something with its contents should be refactored. It’s painful to find code like this and happen to have a string or pointer to some buffer that already contains the data that needs to be converted but the conversion function is buried inside a function that tries to open a file. Go’s io.Reader is so elegant at this.
No one even mentions Google X which rebranded to just X years ago. Clearly it’s been effective that no one even points this out. Yet another winning project.