I'm a developer in silicon valley working on semantic web applications here at moffet field. I did an MS in CS and engineering from a top school and a math/cs double from a normal state uni. I've been promoted up through my jobs over my few years in industry, moving from the midwest out to here with significant pay jumps each time. First, you need to decide what you want to do: do you want to be a developer or something else? If you want to be a developer, forget about all this low level nonsense about assembly code and C. It's totally useless in today's market. Computer programming is all about adding abstraction layers so that you don't have to worry about low level details. You need to build a coding portfolio so that you can prove that you know your stuff. Write a basic web2 app in ruby or java or whatever you are most familiar with, and try to make it as scalable as possible. Deploy it somewhere and let people poke at it. Check out dice.com and craigslist for silicon valley, and if you aren't in a major city get there as fast as possible - you want to be doing development, not maintenance on old legacy code. That means you need to go where the money is at. Of course, you could always be a sell out and just go work for google... If you are worried about knowing what to do? Study mathematics and algorithms extensively, particularly the Cormen textbook. Udi Manber's book is also very good. This will teach you the computational aspects of CS. Then, read up on RDF and the semantic web to get a background in data management. Then practice, practice, practice.