5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Software Engineer

ever wish you could go back and give advice to young yourself well I bet most of you have in this video I'm gonna be talking about the five things I wish I had known before pursuing a software development career coming up welcome back everybody it's your boy Sam from keep on coding the channel where we talk everything tech so if you are new to the channel consider subscribing but let's just jump right into it the first thing is that the industry is not like those day-in-the-life videos when I was considering getting into software development I really had no idea what to expect and I really wanted to know what it would be like when I started working before I went down that path and what better way to see that then to see actual footage of what a typical day is like now these are probably the most viewed videos when it comes to software development so if you are a small youtuber that's a great way to get some exposure and these videos get like millions of views so I think one of them I saw had like 4 million a couple other out of a few million views but these videos are really just for that they're mostly to get views they're meant to be flashy but realistically you're not gonna be eating food all day you're not going to be going on hikes every day you're not gonna be playing volleyball all the time or whatever is in those videos now there might be some companies like that but not any that I've worked for now if I ever made a day in the life video it would start out with my hour-long commute waiting in the cold for the bus to come and then getting on BART which we're stuffed in there basically like sardines and then finally I get into the office I just go straight to my desk and pretty much sit there for like six to seven hours the other hour or two of my day is probably gonna be sitting in meetings or all like 30 minutes to go get lunch but it would honestly be pretty boring so that's why I don't make those kinds of videos but you know I'm not really trying to be a downer here software development is a very rewarding career but just don't think it's gonna be all fun and games at the end of the day they are paying you a lot of money to do work that a lot of other people can't do and on the other spectrum of these videos I see people staying in the office till like 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. and they got in like 8:00 that's 12 hours of your day I don't know about you guys but I'm not staying in the office that late you know you have me for the eight hours and then I'm gonna peace out there needs to either be like a production issue or a hard deadline to have to stay in that but that's the only reason I'm gonna stay late the second piece of advice I would give myself is starting out with a different programming language now programming languages are a lot like real languages the first language you learn and get really good at is kind of like your native language now for me my native language is English but if I try to learn any second or third language no matter how hard I try it won't ever be as good as English the first programming language I learned was C++ but the first one I got really good at was Java and now I'm pretty much married to it and I can't get divorced it's pretty much like the worst kind of marriage and the main reason I would change languages is because of interviews Java is a very verbose language just to get a program up and running you have to write a lot of boilerplate codes and if I could go back and redo it I would have started out learning Python because they've actually been studies shown that you are more likely to get a job if you interview in Python versus Java because in most interviews that you do you can choose the programming language that you interview in and say there's two candidates one interviews in Java one interviews in Python and the person in Python is able to finish their problem a lot faster because it's less verbose well the interviewers aren't gonna care what language you interviewed in unless it's like a specific job for Java they're just gonna say okay this guy I coded it and a lot faster let's give him the job now a lot of you guys that know Python might just say hey we're just smarter than Java developers but I really think that it is because of the reasons I just stated I haven't had a friend who strictly picked up Python so he could interview better and after he switched to Python he was able to get a job at Amazon so obviously it helped him I tried to go that route to learn Python as like an interview language but I never really just felt as comfortable as I did with Java so I pretty much just have to bite the bullet and interview in Java now before we get into number three I have the question of the day and that is what piece of advice would you give to your younger self getting into software development let me know in the comments down below so let's get into number three and that is that you don't need a computer science degree now it definitely does help but there is this myth that you need a degree in computer science in order to be a successful software developer but this bias is starting to go away Google and Apple dropped their no degree policy because they realize how many potential good developers that there out on and I think most likely they had this hard requirement because those companies get so many applicants they need any excuse to weed people out and interviewing candidates cost companies money so it's really a safer pick for them to pick someone who already has some kind of proven track record because they think that they're more likely to eventually get a job offer but there are a lot of solid developers getting hired by companies like uber who don't have this hard requirement for example I knew someone who didn't have a degree or anything they did a three-month boot camp and they got a full-time offer from uber as a software developer I also have co-workers that a lot of my co-workers don't have a degree but they have like 10 plus years of experience so if you ask me whether I could tell or not they went to school for a degree I wouldn't be able to tell you because they have so much experience that it's kind of like that difference has faded away and most people that preach that you don't need a degree are people that don't have degrees so in my opinion that's pretty biased but coming from someone who has a master's degree I think it's pretty justified and I do agree that you don't need one so number four is only trying to work at a faing company and I've been guilty of this as well but I really think that you're limiting yourself here at these large companies like Facebook or Google you're really just like a gear in an entire system and this is true at the individual level as well as the team level for example I had a friend who was at Google and they were like hey yeah I work for the Google Docs team I was like wow that's really impressive and they're like well my team is just in charge of the comment section in Google Docs and if you ever use Google Docs you can leave a comment on a specific section and on the right side it will show the comments there but I thought it was pretty crazy that they had a whole entire team dedicated just to that small feature of the entire application and don't get me wrong I'm sure there's a lot involved in implementing those comments especially because it is an external facing feature but for me I'd rather work on more than just something like that like at my last company we basically did everything from gathering the requirements writing the code testing deployment we're working on different web applications so we're able to use different JavaScript frameworks we built back-end API is using dotnet as well as nodes and we did a lot of database work utilizing sort procedures as well as RMS and if you don't know RMS are basically a way for back in applications to talk to a database and another thing I've heard is hey once you work at a company like Amazon you can get a job anywhere and that's not really true yeah once you work at one of those companies you can get an interview anywhere but you still have to go through a rigorous interview process before you get a job offer it's not like once they see that you have that on your resume they're just gonna come at you with an offer now don't get me wrong don't mistake this for me saying that you shouldn't work for one of these companies because by all means if you get an offer you should probably take it because first of all these companies pay so high and like I mentioned before it will make things easier down the line like getting interviews at other companies but don't measure your successes and failures based on slowly that like I've mentioned before it's more important about the culture of the company that you're going to then the actual name and last but not least we have number five which is that you don't need to work or even go to school specifically in Silicon Valley there are plenty of opportunities outside of the Bay Area you know there are large tech hub is now in Seattle Austin New York and there are even smaller places that are less competitive to get jobs and quite frankly a lot cheaper living for example before I got into grad school I was taking all my computer science prerequisites at a university called Cal State East Bay now most of you guys probably haven't even heard of it but it is an abt accredited school it's part of the California State University system and it is in the Bay Area but you can't tell me that I have more opportunities going there than I would go into a school like UCLA or UC San Diego and don't get me wrong Cal State East Bay is a super underrated program I learned all my CS fundamentals there and I really credit a lot of my success as a developer to that school but being an underrated school they don't get much exposure so I remember going to a career fair there once and I hadn't even heard of any of the companies that were there I think the beginning is I think I've heard of Symantec which was the biggest company there but you go to Korea for like UC San Diego you're gonna get all the big companies so your decisions should be based more on who's or the school or the actual company you're going to and the location that you're at alright so those are the five things I wish I'd known before getting into software development as always I want to thank you guys for making it to the end of the video make sure you smash that like button if you found this video helpful so thank you guys so much for watching have des and I will see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Keep On Coding

Views: 660,765

Rating: 4.9492269 out of 5

Keywords: software engineering, software engineer day in life, software engineering salary, keep on coding, software developer, software developer career, software developer salary, programmer, programming, software engineer

Id: M_GVUj86VaY

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020