Pros & Cons of Being a Software Engineer

what's going on everybody welcome back to another video my name is Sam this is the keep on coding Channel and today we're gonna be talking about the pros and the cons of being a software developer coming up so we're gonna start out with the pros you know I want to get your confidence up a little bit before I hit you guys with the bad news but the first thing I want to talk about is salary I mean I have to talk about salary I have to you know if you go to Google and you search software engineer or software developer the next thing that it autocompletes do is salary I mean why do you think so many people flock to Silicon Valley or other big tech hubs around the world it's for the money there's a reason why the bear is becoming so overpopulated the traffic's become crazy the housing prices are now one of the most expensive in the world so if we go to this website here called levels FYI and some of you guys might be familiar with this site this gives you the different levels of all the major tech companies so a Facebook a grad level engineer will be making a hundred and eighty for total compensation you know when you factor in salary stock bonus so bonus could be something like a sign-on bonus you know if you have to move they'll pay you a stipend for moving and it could just be you know a bonus that you get at the end of the year for your performance and then obviously stock Facebook stock and you know that could go up even higher if the Facebook stock goes up so an e3 at Facebook will be considered like an entry level or a new grad roll-y starts out with 3 and not 2 or 1 I have no idea maybe someone else knows but III is like the entry level now once you get some experience and you get a promotion you get to e4 and if we look at this this is two hundred and forty-three thousand dollars almost a quarter million dollars a year which is like actually insane if you really think about it for being an employee you know in the same time that you took to get your high school diploma or go to college you could've made a million dollars so that's pretty crazy now I know you know not everyone's gonna be working at Facebook but even if you go to you know maybe a more modest company you know what is a little bit more modest here you know if you go to like Adobe which is you know a solid company you know a software engineer one 140 thousand you know that it's almost as good so the salaries are pretty insane and that is a and that is one of the big pros of being a software developer now I know money isn't everything but I've had I've heard people say you know I don't care about money when I'm getting a job they were like yeah I was interviewing with someone and they were talking about how much money they make and didn't know that I don't care about money and I was like okay well I bet you if your boss tomorrow comes in and is like hey you know what since you don't care about money we're just not gonna pay you anymore but we still want you to come in and do all your you know everything that you normally do I bet you 99% are probably a hundred percent of you would be like no I'm not coming into work or even if we're like we're slashing your salary by 25% you know no one's gonna be happy about that that's why I had to mention salary first so for number two the second Pro are the benefits that you get most companies are gonna be offering you full insurance you know like your vision medical dental because they have to if they want to be competitive with the other tech companies you know they have solid 401k matching Google has a 50% match on your 401k which is pretty crazy so you know you can put up to 18 thousand I think they might have raised it but it's about 18 thousand they'll pay 50 percent so you get an additional nine thousand dollars a year just for your 401k and they just have the other benefits that they throw in like they pay for your transportation they pay for a lot of your education so you want to go get like a master's while you're working a lot of people will pay for all or a lot of it they usually have like a great maternity or paternity leave free gym membership some companies have unlimited PTO which it's kind of questionable if you asked me I've been in a situation where they had unlimited PTO which wasn't really but if you are at a good company that actually like respects that you can get a lot of time off which is really nice another thing another benefit is the free food that you get right you know I've talked about it before in my videos you know you day in the life video what are they gonna be showing you like it's Gumbel's like a requirement that they have to show them like putting food into their plate it's like free food filming yourself coding and you know filming your community those like the three requirements for those types of videos but you know at some companies you know you can go in eat breakfast there I like eight or nine get free lunch and then before you go home I like five or six go grab dinner so you basically are not paying for any food the next Pro of being a software developer are the smart co-workers that you get to work with and even in my pretty short career of only a few years of being a software developer you know you get to work with people that have like 10 to 20 years of experience and really experience is the best teacher because I mean you know if you're working for 20 years you've pretty much seen it all and there's stuff that you've seen that you won't be able to learn just you know from reading a book and you know what co-workers have saved me so much time just on like even like little things that I've been stuck on where I just needed a fresh pair of eyes to look at and then they end up looking at it and they find out that you just missed a semicolon and you kind of feel like an idiot but when you have a lot of people you know with different skill sets you guys kind of like come together and you know for example like my sequel might not be the best so if I'm stuck on a query I'll have someone help me out with that but then maybe that same person is not as good at front-end they'll come ask me and then I'll help them with that so it's kind of like you know once you get a group of people that have different skill sets you guys kind of like come together and learn from each other the next thing I want to talk about is job security now this one's a little bit shaky because you're never fully safe especially if you're working at a start-up like the startup could go under and you can get let go and it might not even be anything but you know Simon your fault or even if you had a big company and they're doing some kind of like reorganization you could be let go it's fairly easy to get a job somewhere else you know as long as you have some experience and you you know you brush up on your programming skills you should be able to find somewhere else fairly quickly and this depends on your interviewing skills you know how strong are you at your data structures and algorithms but luckily those are skills that can be picked up so the next Pro I wanted to talk about is that your work can affect a lot of people say you're working on some kind of external facing website and build you know even like a small feature that's gonna impact the lives of you know thousands or tens of thousands of people gene even like show your friends or your family be like hey let go to this website like hey look I built that and I think it's a pretty cool feeling another thing could be internal tools for me I build stuff that other people in the company use and it's really cool when someone else comes up to me and like hey that feature that you build like saved our team so much time and you know just a good feeling another thing is the ability to work for yourself you know if you're a full-stack engineer once you your skills get really good you have the potential to start your own business you know all it takes is really one good idea and then you have the skill set to build that out another thing could be freelance work you know you could charge companies like a hundred dollars an hour to build to help build out their website so it definitely gives you a lot of flexibility it gives you a lot of freedom and the possibilities are endless all right so that takes us to the question of the day which is what is one thing that you consider to be a pro or con of being a software development let me know in the comments all right so with the pros come the cons right with with good comes evil with seven good seasons of Game of Thrones comes season eight you need to have that balance so let's just get into the cons now the first con is salary now I know I said that this was a pro but just hear me out bear with me for a second so if you're working for yourself you're gonna have to pay your insurance you're gonna have to pay you know you don't get a 401k you can get a retirement account but you can't put nearly as much in but if you work for a tech company you get all these things so it really deters people from leaving and starting like their own business or their own hustle but to be honest you know a lot of these tech companies use like we saw Facebook write like 250,000 that's great but it's not enough to retire you know Facebook has so much cash that they could easily double their salad or double their engineers salaries and not even feel it but they pay you just enough so you won't leave but they don't pay you enough so you leave so that's kind of like the idea it's called the golden handcuffs where you're getting paid well you're gonna live comfortably but at the end of the day you are still handcuffed to your job like imagine if like if I was on Facebook salary that 250 K and say they doubled it 500 K you know I would just work for like five to ten years get like you know two to five million dollars and then probably just go retire on an island or something now some of you guys are totally fine with that and you know I can't knock you for it you know maybe you have a you know maybe you have a family and kids and you're settled down maybe you don't want you don't care about like okay I'm gonna go like start own business or something and you're happy with that steady solid income the next con is the competition now yes there are a lot of software development jobs out there but honestly the majority of software engineers are only going for like that top set of companies which can make things very competitive when you're trying to get a job there I mean you guys have seen some of the interview questions that get asked at these top companies they're difficult problems and and it's hard because you have a certain time limit you have like 30 minutes to an hour to solve the problem so you know you have to code well you have to code ball under pressure there's a lot of stuff going on there you have to be able to talk while you're coding which is really hard for a lot of people and you know like I said you know people go where the money is these top companies have their pick of the litter so they're just gonna pick you know whoever does the best in the interviews so that's one thing it's it's there's a lot of competition the next thing I want to talk about is coming into the office when it's unnecessary I mostly just find this one annoying you know as someone who has a pretty bad commute it seems kind of unnecessary to come into the office five days a week when I literally just go in and then just go to my computer and just do what I could have been doing at home we have one of the few jobs probably in history where we can get away with you know just working at their own comfort or of our own home but you know a lot of companies don't let you take advantage of that so definitely a con in my book another thing is that we have to sit in a chair and stare at a screen all day you know I'm someone who likes to be outdoors I like to be active and you know that can be it can be challenging to just like stay in one spot all day on the bright side of things you know a lot of jobs nowadays are just staring on the street you know I told that to one of my friends and he's like he's a lawyer and he was like dude I stare at a screen all day too so you know it's it's kind of like where things are heading you know one thing you can do is get a standing desk and you can like sit and stand throughout the day which is what I do if you can get like one of those like electronic ones that keep track the presets of you know the different heights and supposedly it's better for you if you are sitting and standing throughout the day although like there was like a study that said you know standing throughout the day is not good for you but then probably next month there'll be a study that says the opposite so you know I just kind of do what I'm comfortable with the next con here is working in either old technologies or technologies that you don't want to work on you know when you have a job it's kind of like okay you need to work on this and you really don't have much of a say or if you're working at a company where honestly like if it's more than like five years old you're probably gonna be dealing with some legacy code now I don't know about you guys but I really like new stuff and I like building stuff I don't like digging through really old code I've had to do that and a lot of my jobs unfortunately I mean every job has things that you don't like about it you know even if you're like a professional athlete you have to like you know give interviews and deal with the media so like every job has that but like for me that's like one of the big things that I don't like about our industry is just working with like old code because you know can get kind of yucky alright so the last thing is that you always have to be learning and I put this one last because it could kind of be a pro and a con personally I love learning if I go a long time without learning something new I get depressed I used to be a bank teller for like two years and it was like doing the same thing every day like hello like cash a cheque hello the positive cheque like doing that every day for like two years you know I was dreading going into work but in software development we're always learning will there be learning from you know some kind of mistake that we made learning a new technology like I could spend my whole life learning about software development and I wouldn't even I would barely scratch the surface but our industry is very fast-paced it's very easy to get left behind you even look at like all the JavaScript frameworks it seems like there's a new one every month you know you have to keep track of all this stuff or you're gonna go obsolete you know iOS updates every year you have to keep your app updated or you risk the chance that it breaks you can pretty much never chill or you're gonna be obsolete I know it's harsh but it's kind of like the survival of the fittest that's why I say it's a pro in a con and I really do think that so those are the pros and cons of being a software developer you know these are my personal opinions but you guys disagree that's fine just let me know in the comments make sure you guys you know smash that like button as always thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Keep On Coding

Views: 308,914

Rating: 4.9508672 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, computer science

Id: aRnXLrS6C1U

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020