"I want to work at Google after university."
I heard it three times in one cafeteria conversation. Said with complete confidence. Never written actual code nor debugged something at 11pm because it was actually their problem to fix.
I didn't say much. I used to say the same thing.
About four years ago my dad handed me a book called Programming for Beginners. I was overwhelmed, then hooked, then delusional. I watched The Internship, that movie where two middle-aged guys become Google interns and everything is colorful offices and free food and changing the world. I remember thinking: yes. That. That's the plan.
Then I got a working student job at a company with 50 (or so) people. Everyone knew my name. My code went into production in the second week. When I had a question, I asked the team lead directly, not a ticketing system. When there was a decision about which framework to use, I was in the room.
The Google dream quietly stopped making sense.
People are optimizing for the story, not the job. "I work at Google" is clean. It wins at family dinners, but depends on who you're sitting with. It performs well with LinkedIn lunatics. It is a flex.
The problem is that optimizing for the story means you stop asking whether you'd actually be good at the job, or whether you'd even like it. At a large company as a junior developer, you are one of hundreds. You work on a slice of a slice of a system you will never fully understand. You attend meetings about your meetings. You are not changing the world. You are incrementing a counter somewhere in a pipeline that feeds a dashboard that a PM looks at once a week.
At the 50-person company, I was Tim. I had real responsibility from day one, not because they were generous, but because there was no one else.
The money thing is a separate problem, though it's related.
My classmates talk about six-figure salaries the way people talk about lottery tickets: as the inevitable outcome of some vague future effort. TikTok creators sell the dream of quick riches. LinkedIn is full of 22-year-old "founders" with no product. Success is measured in euros, not in what you actually built.
The version of success worth having doesn't start with the money. It starts with getting obsessively good at something useful. The money, if it comes, comes later. Every person I've read about who actually made something real was chasing the problem, not the outcome.
I know that sounds obvious. But watch how people spend their time and you'll see it isn't obvious at all.
Last semester we had a group project. Seven people. Zero coordination. Everything done the night before. Two people did the actual work. The other five had decided somewhere along the way that showing up was enough, that a degree would carry them, that the job market would sort itself out.
Those five are going to be surprised.
University does not prepare you for the working world. This is not a criticism, it's just a fact. An internship helps, but even then you're the intern. You're not accountable for anything that matters. The real gap between "I studied computer science" and "I can build and ship software that people use" is something you have to close yourself.
How? Build something. Anything. It doesn't have to work at first. It just has to be yours. A project where you make the decisions, feel the consequences, and figure out why it broke. That experience compounds in a way that grades don't.
The Google dream is fine. Dreams are fine. But wanting something and being ready for it are two different things. Most of my classmates are focused entirely on the first part.