Being on the other side of the interview table is helpful for perspective. You might even experience this if your team is hiring for a position and wants you to look over resumes, do phone interviews, in person interviews etc.
If I interview six people for a position, usually one is really good, four are average, and one is really bad. Guess who is getting the offer? It's almost a paradoxical thing - being average is good enough to keep a job, but you have to be in the top 16% to get a job. Lucky for you, the above average interviewer usually gets competing offers, so that leaves the less attractive job slots open.
If you take six random programmers with a CS degree and <2 years experience, are you the best of those six? If not, you're one of the four average ones, and are not going to pass most interviews unless the market is hot and they desperately need you or you have a friend bringing you in who vouches you can do the job.
You also say you want to "get into top-tier companies / projects". Well, that doesn't mean being one standard deviation above the mean, it means being two standard deviations above the mean.
So now you don't just have to be the one in six that sticks out as good, you have to be the one in fifty that sticks out as great. You know those one out of six quality tier guys I talked about? Now you're competing with just them, and you have to be the best among seven or so of them for the job.
When I was studying CS, I was once assigned to write a homework on the process scheduler for Linux, Mac and Windows. Within 20 minutes I'd know I would have an A on the paper - that was all the study into the subject that was necessary for that mark. But then I continued to read about process schedulers for the rest of the night, because I always wanted to look into it, never really had, and if I was ever going to do it, I knew then would have been the time.
I'm not like that all the time in terms of devotion to learning CS, but if I was, I would have a shot in being one of those two standard deviations above the curve programmers. Because that's what they do, even after they know they got the A on the paper, they keep reading even if it takes hours just so they really know and understand the subject more fully.
If I interview six people for a position, usually one is really good, four are average, and one is really bad. Guess who is getting the offer? It's almost a paradoxical thing - being average is good enough to keep a job, but you have to be in the top 16% to get a job. Lucky for you, the above average interviewer usually gets competing offers, so that leaves the less attractive job slots open.
If you take six random programmers with a CS degree and <2 years experience, are you the best of those six? If not, you're one of the four average ones, and are not going to pass most interviews unless the market is hot and they desperately need you or you have a friend bringing you in who vouches you can do the job.
You also say you want to "get into top-tier companies / projects". Well, that doesn't mean being one standard deviation above the mean, it means being two standard deviations above the mean.
So now you don't just have to be the one in six that sticks out as good, you have to be the one in fifty that sticks out as great. You know those one out of six quality tier guys I talked about? Now you're competing with just them, and you have to be the best among seven or so of them for the job.
When I was studying CS, I was once assigned to write a homework on the process scheduler for Linux, Mac and Windows. Within 20 minutes I'd know I would have an A on the paper - that was all the study into the subject that was necessary for that mark. But then I continued to read about process schedulers for the rest of the night, because I always wanted to look into it, never really had, and if I was ever going to do it, I knew then would have been the time.
I'm not like that all the time in terms of devotion to learning CS, but if I was, I would have a shot in being one of those two standard deviations above the curve programmers. Because that's what they do, even after they know they got the A on the paper, they keep reading even if it takes hours just so they really know and understand the subject more fully.