15 Reasons To Become A Software Engineer

what's up everybody how's it going in this video i want to share with you the 15 i can't make 15 with my hands but the 15 best things that i have identified about the field of software engineering and when i say the field of software engineering i'm also talking about coding programming being a software engineer all these things fall under the same category here and i want to be clear that i am not implying that other career paths or professions do not have these 15 things i'm sure some of them have some of the 15 things but the point is software engineering has all 15 things and i think they're really good they really make a great case for wanting to be a software engineer and hopefully you'll find them valuable either if you're considering becoming a software engineer or if you already are to validate your choice let me know what you think about them in the comments below and let me know if i missed any great things about software engineering oh and i don't mean to entice you too much but points 13 14 and 15 are pretty mind-blowing so you definitely don't want to miss them and you definitely want to watch the video till the end so with that let's jump into the first one in no particular order and this one is one that i've mentioned many times before on this channel it's that software engineers tend to have great compensation there are very few other fields that pay as well as the software engineering field especially given the amount of education required or the amount of years of experience required for certain compensation levels this is especially true in the us in high cost of living areas like new york city or other big cities but even across the world software engineers tend to be paid pretty well and that's obviously a great perk the second thing that's awesome about software engineering is that all things considered the work and the work-life balance for software engineers is pretty chill now i'm sure that some of you are going to disagree some of you are going to say wait at some companies or on some teams the work is really stressful or there isn't good work-life balance sometimes you have to be on-call where you can get paged in the middle of the night but the point is that all things considered on average i think that the work of a software engineer is pretty chill you're sitting at a computer most of the day you're doing kind of non-stressful work maybe sometimes during crunch time overall if you compare to other professions where you have to actually like save people's lives let's say if you're a surgeon or a police officer or maybe you're going to be put in physical danger or it's a physically demanding job software engineering does not have all that and it's just overall pretty chill which is a great perk the third best thing about software engineering again in no particular order is that it is a field with a very low barrier to entry ultimately any person from any background at any age with any educational background can learn to code and can become a software engineer i'm not saying that it's going to be easy but it can be done and it's a field where this is super widely accepted these days you've got tons of alternative education methods for software engineering but lots of people and companies support and promote like coding bootcamps i went to coding bootcamp like online schools like being self-taught all these things are very possible with software engineering and that's just really awesome the fourth best thing is that software engineers are in super high demand right now every company is hiring software engineers this trend is not slowing down you've got big tech companies like amazon that have announced that they're going to be hiring like crazy over the next few years and that's just awesome for software engineers that means that if you are looking to change jobs you can likely get an interview very easily and very quickly now obviously if you are a new grad or you know someone just entering the field so entry level it might feel a little bit more difficult and that's kind of always the case when you don't have any work experience but if you have one to two years of work experience or more then you start to immediately notice that it's very easy to get interviews very easy to switch jobs and that's an awesome perk number five on the topic of interviews this is something that i think is really good about software engineering i'm curious what you think at most companies when you're going to interview for a software engineering role you're going to go through the same kind of interview you're going to go through algorithm style coding interviews and maybe systems design interviews if you are more senior and i know that a lot of people dislike algorithm interviews and i'm not saying that you should like them but what i am saying is that you know what to expect because most companies do it this way and it's a very straightforward transparent process and you've got a lot of resources great resources to prepare for these interviews for example my company i'll go expert you can go to algoexpert.io use the promo code clem clem for discount on the platform and you have everything handed to you on a silver platter to prepare for the interviews and ace them and land your next dream job as a software engineer i think that is a perk that not every other profession has a lot of other professions the interviews are kind of a black box or depends on the company and you don't have awesome prep tools like i'll go expert number six this one is similar to number four but a little bit different and it's the fact that as a software engineer you have high job security software engineers are going to be needed in one year in two years and five years and 10 years and 25 years i do not think that ai will obsolete software engineers you can quote me on that maybe i'll be wrong but i really don't think so i think that software engineers are going to continue to be one of the most in-demand jobs and that means that you shouldn't fear that you are going to lose your job or that your skills are going to become worthless they're not they're probably going to keep becoming more and more valuable especially if you keep them sharp number seven if you're someone who appreciates having variety because you feel like you get bored easily at work if you're doing the same thing over and over again which is probably most of us well software engineering is probably great for you because software engineering does offer a lot of variety first of all within you know a single like normal software engineer's job there's a lot of variety sometimes you're fixing small bugs sometimes you're implementing big features and that can just be very different types of work but then also if you get bored working in one programming language for example like let's say you've worked in javascript for two years then maybe you can get a job working in c plus which is going to be very different from working in javascript or maybe you're working with a specific framework like angular and you can switch to another framework like react to get a little bit more variety or maybe you can change the stack of the part of the stack that you're working on from front end to back end or to infrastructure to mobile engineering there's a ton of variety and that's a great perk number eight i think that software engineering can be a very appealing field to both introverts and extroverts introverts i think is pretty obvious if you're introverted you likely prefer working alone not with too many other people maybe you're really introverted and you never want to work with other people and here the stereotype of a software engineer which is someone you know at their computer all day with headphones you know not talking to anybody is going to apply you can probably do that you know there were a lot of people for example at google or at facebook who were you know very kind of lone individual contributors and who did just that code all day don't talk to people but similarly i think that software engineering and coding can be a very collaborative process there are a lot of teams at big tech companies or startups where you're going to be working with a lot of other people you're going to be going to meetings you're going to be talking to them code reviews especially if you're working you know in person with people around you like it can be very social it doesn't have to be put your headphones on all day and don't talk to people it can be if you want it to be but it doesn't have to be that's something that's really important i think for for people who get turned off by the stereotype of a software engineer because it's it doesn't have to be that way and it can be very appealing to extroverted people and you can even go into other parts of software engineering like for example engineering management which is a very people focused career track and that's you know something that lends itself super well to extroverts number nine software engineering is perhaps the most remote friendly field out there there are very very few other fields or professions where all you need genuinely to do your job is a laptop and an internet connection i have said this multiple times before i feel very fortunate that on algo expert you know running my company algo expert where i'm effectively a software engineer but also i suppose ceo um but i can work from anywhere in the world like i could legit go to the maldives tomorrow and run the business perfectly all that i need is a computer and an internet connection that's a really awesome perk and software engineering has that perk number 10 i think that software engineering can appeal to people who are more creative and feel a little bit more artistic as well as to people who are more analytical and feel like they're more driven by numbers and data to give you two kind of extremes if you are a software engineer you could choose to be more of a ux engineer where a lot of your work is going to involve also designing the look of web pages or apps perhaps legitimately you know drawing out the designs and then implementing them in css and javascript and html and that can be a much more creative and artistic kind of process now conversely on the sort of opposite end of that spectrum you could maybe choose to be a data engineer or a machine learning engineer where you're going to be working much more with you know data numbers uh perhaps you know statistics and that's going to be to some extent less creative or at least less like artistic because there's an argument to be made there's a lot of creativity in that type of work but the point is software engineering can appeal to very different kinds of people on this creativity or artistic spectrum and that is a great perk number 11 i'm gonna stop using my hands because i only have 10 fingers but number 11 software engineering can allow you to work as part of any industry because of virtually every industry out there needs software engineers and so if you're interested in something that is totally unrelated to software engineering but you want to be a software engineer you could work at a company that works in that field so for example maybe you're interested in crypto or in fashion or in sports and you can work at a company in those industries but as a software engineer and be exposed to those industries all the while remaining a software engineer awesome perk number 12 software engineering can be a great trampoline to another career for example product management most product managers need to have been former software engineers venture capital if you want to be a venture capitalist you'll find that a lot of venture capital firms require coding background or software engineering background because they want you to be able to to really understand tech at a more fundamental level or entrepreneurship i always give this is the example because you know i built my company algo expert by way of having been a software engineer learning to code or rather knowing how to code is perhaps the most valuable skill that you can have to build your own company it is so so so so helpful so the point is software engineering can be a great trampoline for all these other career paths number 13 this one is hard to put into words but i'm going to do my best i think it's a really cool and important perk or thing about software engineering and coding it's that it is one of these activities that has such a quick if not instant kind of feedback loop where you can immediately know whether or not your work is correct or immediately see the output of your work and it's an incredible feeling the only other field or activity that i can think of that i've encountered in my life that had a similar feedback loop was video editing when you're editing a video especially trying to do a cool montage you get that feedback very quickly you know you make your edits you make your cuts you add certain you know special effects and you kind of immediately see the fruits of your labor well coding is exactly that now whether you're building something on the front end of the website and you immediately see things appear on the page or whether you're building some sort of api and you see your api kind of working and taking shape and you're able to head the api endpoints instantly or for example if you're working on problems on algo expert and you're running code and you see the test cases passing that's the type of feedback that i mean you know you can see your output in the console that can be super addicting and it's a very just cool and unique feature i suppose of software engineering and coding number 14 this is another one that's kind of tough to describe in just one line i'll do my best to explain it but basically i think that software engineering is a field that has an incredible amount of super useful and super polished tooling now what i mean by this is every field if you think about it can benefit from cool custom tools and if we're talking about software engineering i'm thinking things like editors code editors or libraries or you know documentation websites things like that but you can imagine that if you're a doctor maybe you could use some cool tool that you know can tell you like what a disease is or what like uh you know the medicine needed for a particular um injury is or something like that right or if you're a lawyer maybe you could have a tool that gives you you know the the laws that you need to use for your contract i don't know but the point is you can imagine that there are all these tools that could be useful but the thing is who's going to build those tools well probably software engineers or not probably certainly because the idea is like most of these tools end up being digital right and so for these other professions you need software engineers who are passionate about those other professions and probably who have experience in those other professions so you probably need like you know a former lawyer turned software engineer to build such a tool whereas for software engineering you've got all the software engineers already who just want to build tools for themselves so basically i think that you guys get this incredible amount of like native tooling and you know cool stuff built for software engineers that you just don't see in other fields and professions and i think that is an awesome perk last but not least number 15 i think that coding is the closest thing to a superpower that we as human beings have access to ultimately superpowers don't exist obviously you can't fly you can't make things appear out of thin air but with coding you can genuinely build so many things that otherwise would be impossible to build and that when you do build them just really feel like absurd feel like you had a superpower and you were suddenly able to build something that you would have never thought possible before and a good example that i'll give you here is without go expert when sometimes i take a step back and think of what we built on algo expert you know we have a platform that supports tens of thousands of users on it who can you run code on the platform they can save code on the platform they can watch videos they can do mock interviews with other users anywhere across the world we have a bunch of features you know on the platform that help make the platform just run more smoothly and to think that all of that was built just out of thin air like out of thin air because we wrote a few lines of codes or a few hundred thousand lines of code or how many lines of code we wrote on a code editor is this pretty incredible and then you think of all the like way more impressive products out there like google search like youtube like um apple products right all of that because of coding it's a pretty awesome superpower if you ask me so that's an awesome perk about software engineering and with that that is going to conclude my 15 best things about the field let me know what you thought about them in the comments below did i miss any let me know if you enjoyed the video don't forget to smash the like button it really helps me out subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on linkedin and twitter if you enjoy short formatting content instagram if you like pictures and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Clément Mihailescu

Views: 23,148

Rating: 4.9347639 out of 5

Keywords: software engineering perks, software engineering benefits, software engineering pros and cons, the best things about software engineering, the best things about coding, coding pros and cons, programming pros and cons, the best things about programming, is software engineering worth it, is programming worth it, is coding worth it, is software development worth it, reasons to become a software engineer, reasons to learn coding, reasons to learn programming, software engineering

Id: 8_Q7psvRxTM

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021