> I'm pretty sure you would get into Berkeley with that profile

I was rejected from EECS@Cal and CS@CMU at the time (though my alum interviewer for CMU kept in contact with me to this day, and helped open doors for me professionally) yet got into an Ivy and waitlisted at MIT ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And this was before college admissions got as competitive as it is for you guys today.

Most HNers graduated college in the 1990s and early 2000s and don't realize how competitive admissions have become across the board from 2008-09 onwards.

> Also you can just major in math and get a job as a software engineer anyways

Absolutely! Applied Math is a heavily interdisciplinary major that is very powerful.