How does one go from making college-level projects to making massive industry-grade products?

Incrementally move to massive scale and/or complexity with progressively larger problem scope and personal responsibility.  Iteratively approach industry-leading quality by not repeating mistakes you've encountered before (yours and other peoples') on new projects.  As suggests this is much more accessible (people actively recruit you) once you have enough initial experience. While reading relevant papers is a good way to start projects, the hard issues (like how to validate what you built, design so that problems can be debugged,  make systems resilient to unavoidable implementation errors, apply appropriate software process) are practical ones solved by engineers who write relatively little about what they did.  You'll go farther sooner  standing on the shoulders of such people farther along the path than independently re-inventing the wheel.  Seek them out as co-workers and don't expect to find them at mature companies where cruft and hiring practices get in the way of practicing their art or geographic locations which don't have healthy ecosystems building complex software. At some point progression will require completely new projects which don't yet have the constraints implied by  intellectual property already owned by an organization.  There are a lot more opportunities to do that in the San Francisco Bay Area than elsewhere.  We have 3X more venture capital deals than second place contenders like New York City, New England, and LA.  The advantage is  10-20:1 over third-tier cities like Austin TX, Boulder CO, Portland OR,  Raleigh NC, and Seattle WA.   That comes at the cost of affordable  houses and culture although many people are happier optimizing what they do for work on which they spend more waking hours than anything else. Paradoxically location matters more than it did before ubiquitous high-speed internet.  Decades ago hardware constraints limited software scope, the orders of magnitude separating simple from complex, and the accompanying diversity of thought needed to solve different problems.  Now that's no longer the case and people benefit more from living in larger ecosystems where they're more likely to have experts to work with in and around their areas of specialization.

Get a job.  Work maintenance on existing projects.  Get practice.  Network.  Get involved in more ambitious, "make something better" projects.  Get practice.  Network.  Get noticed.  Get involved in a brand new development as project lead.  Get practice.  Network. Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat. Take over the world. Profit!

How do you become a top industry-grade software engineer?  Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: "practice, practice, practice." You can get practice in a couple of ways: by getting a job with a company that's doing interesting stuff, or by finding an open-source project that's doing interesting stuff and becoming a contributor.  In either case, expect to put in your time "paying your dues" by doing maintenance work, fixing bugs, documenting, and so forth, before you're trusted to work on more central parts of the application in question. These days, most of the more-advanced things you can learn about will be found online.  Find the news sites that cover the technology you're interested in, but, beyond that, find out who is working in the areas you want to learn about, and learn all you can about them.  Follow them on social media, and see if they have regular blogs where they talk about what they're working on. (Many do.) Engage them to a certain degree, just don't "stalk" them.  Mostly, listen to what they have to say. Advanced math isn't as important as you might think.  Some graphics work relies on matrix algebra, but the math for most software that people use (outside of big supercomputer simulations and the like) doesn't really get beyond basic algebra. You can also start some of your own projects as open-source and put them up on GitHub or the like.  Part of what this does is it helps build up a "portfolio" of sorts, which you may be able to leverage to get a better job than you might otherwise have done, as potential employers can see your work. Keep an open mind, keep learning outside the classroom, and keep in practice. That's the best way to get ahead. Hat tip: for the "unofficial" A2A. Edit: Read 's comment below, too. I like what he has to say.

TL;DR   All the above mentioned companies have one underlying concept at their heart, or at least had one when they started. They all focused on solving a problem or filling up a gap. Before Google, even the biggest corporations failed to create a search engine which made some sense. Come Google and boom! Google grew up from there. Google never thought about how they would support a billion users. I believe that is a recipe for disaster, because then you are an ant looking at scaling Mt Everest and would die out before the summit is even nigh enough.   I am already 7 years out of college and so wish that the current MOOC world was so open at that time. As I write this, everything you require to be a great programmer+entrepreneur, solving internet scale problems to how to sell those solutions as products, are available as courses on platforms like Coursera, Edx etc. Make the most of them.   Again, try to solve a problem. It would show you the way if you persist with it.

If you want to know the real answer to your question do not read this answer... I told you stop reading!!....  I am serious stop reading or you will become for ever unemployable by any one in Silicon Valley () EDIT:  Any blog links may or may not be working the owner of the blog somehow  took a dislike to this answer and deleted them.  Again proving reading  it bad for your health.  This is true of the linked questions. Ok you asked for it here it is: For my general bio and such see one thing you will see is I ****SUCK**** at math (and apparently what passes for as the non-CNF language called English) and think it has no real place in CS. I am going to disagree with almost everyone's answer.... the answer *IS NOT* practice it is learning how work smarter and when you have the all the fancy support systems of a university and/or company your not forced to work smarter and not harder (yes the company/school give lip service but if the cost of saving you an hr was greater then the cost of paying you for the hr guess what your doing tonight... since your cost to the school is near zero [except the power your presence consumes] it has no incentive to give you assignments to keep you busy).    Step 1: STOP DOING COLLEGE ASSIGNMENTS Either do the assignment professionally or not at all.   Like in real life it is up to you a) prove you a professional not the school or the company and b) there is no such thing as college projects these are work projects (if you need to motivate your self pay your self $1/hr or something) Now back to the general answer.    So the best way to *REALLY* learn how to do it right is then do it for real (not what some employer calls real, but I mean fucking for real) namely do projects that you must do or you starve.   Do this 2 or 3 times and you will be sr. and do it 5 or 6 times and you will be world class.  Do it 9-10 times (like I have) and you're an insane masochist. Step 2: DON'T WORK FOR SOMEONE ELSE The only way is to do it right or starve and the quickest way to starve is start your own company.    Your first company should be throw away and you should stay to relatively simple commercial jobs in it (you will not loose too much face here instead of going for the golden ring and failing). Here goes the first secret of the industry:  None of the people you listed in the details as developers are developers they are BUSINESS PEOPLE (the evil suits). Now that you have the environment that you can really learn in lets take the next steps: Step 3: FORGET ALL THE CS YOU HAVE LEARNED Every invention I have made (8 total) has because I refused to accept what CS said about some thing.   For example an idea I had a few years ago when I returned to get my BA in CS after 20 years in the industry was when I realized that my theory of computation book was full of it on a key problem in decidability.   Forth coming product so no more details. Don't worry if anyone else thinks your wrong or right as long your code works and proves the point who  cares what those who do not have the time or brain power to understand it can't.    Such this harassing troll I am dealing with right now who thinks he understands better then I do when I invented the thing in the first place. Step 4: YOUR GUT IS RIGHT NOT SOMEONE ELSE Even if you are wrong you will learn so much more then you worked for someone else it is worth it (even if your poor clients don't agree). Step 5: ALWAYS DO PROJECTS BEYOND YOUR CURRENT SKILLS Part of what you need to learn is your limits and this will teach them to you. Step 6: READ READ READ Now that you have killed a couple smalll dragons learning the right way above it is now time to go back to school and learn the right way.   Read the classics of software engineering:   The mythical man-month   Goto considered harmful   The gang of four    Recursive Make Considered Harmful   The pragmatic programmer Step 7: MAKE A FRAMEWORK  You will fail but attempting to make one will teach what you need for being an architect. Step 8: GIVE UP YOUR COMPANY By now your going to have all kinds of horrible unmaintainable legacy code.    It was wrtten by such an idiot that it is unsavable. Step 9:  COME UP WITH THE NEXT KILLER APP AND MAKE IT The rest is up to you If you want a mentor we are looking for help in making our secure open source IaaS/PaaS (no other IaaS/PaaS can make even 1/10th the security claims we must make under the law and we surpass that by a mile).   I promise to be mercless on your code.    The plus though is since it is commercial open source you can sell the results of some or most your work doing steps 1 and 2

Let me thank you for asking a very specific and fabulous question. It is evident many are in search of this answer. I have resource which is tailor-made for you. It has been specifically created/ compiled to cater to software development aspect of building highly scalable software products. http://www.aosabook.org/en/ It contains three books consisting of personal experiences about technical challenges faced by the chief technical developers of some large scalable software product  many of which are still in use today, ranging from databases to web applications. All challenges are covered with strong focus on technical aspect, with all of aspects written by main software developers themselves thus covering all experiences in the order experienced, thus exposing us to their trail of thought patterns. This is what I believe you are looking for. While all other answers are very useful indeed, you already have enough experience under your belt, but you wish to proceed to next level. All above experiences shared in those books will definitely give you ideas on how those smart programmers worked out their problems, but you will have to get yourself into situation where you can experience this firsthand. Unless you are ready to reinvent the wheel again and yet you may not have opportunity to test your product in market to its limit. Sorry buddy, but you have to trust yourself. Take the dive. You already should know your strengths & limitations by now, with your pet projects but go change jobs if you are unhappy with your job trajectory.

While making collage level projects, people usually don't follow best practices (at least I didn't).  So if you are planning to develop some real world applications, SOFTWARE BEST PRACTICES is the first and foremost thing you should be looking into. Apart from that: Choose technology and framework after doing some research. Keep this in mind ONE SHOE DOESN'T FIT ALL. Don't even think of deploying your application unless you've done thorough TESTING. Choose your HOSTING PROVIDER wisely. Create a separate TEST ENVIRONMENT to test your application. Following are the technologies that you should look for: Angular JS: Best front end framework(MVC framework). RESTful web services. MongoDB: NoSQL Database. I hope this information is helpful for you.