What I ACTUALLY do as a software engineer (junior developer)

[Music] not all of us are working at these fan companies where they've got like fancy cafes and restaurants and they get massages every Monday I don't know if they do that but whenever I watch these videos on what it's like to be a software engineer at some of these big companies it just seems like so luxurious and I'm like that's not what I experienced [Music] I've been thinking a lot about the software engineer job and how I feel like it's been kind of idealized a lot especially in social media and so I wanted to make this video to talk about my experience what my day-to-day is actually like what do I do in my job and hopefully give you a perspective that I think is closer to what your reality would be like especially if you're someone like me going to boot camp route and working like a medium-sized company all right so now let's just dive into the meat of this video which is what is it really like to be a software engineer and specifically in my position a junior developer a little bit about my specific position I work for a medium-sized company based here in Atlanta I work nine to five Mondays through Fridays in the summer times we get off at noon on Fridays which is amazing I feel like I've got great work-life balance with this kind of 40 Hour Work Week type of regular schedule we have flexible time off so if I needed to take time off for whatever reason I can do so and the other thing I really love about this job is that it's 100 remote so I mostly work here in my office slash YouTube Studio but I'm also able to go into the office in person whenever I want to so we have a really amazing office in downtown Atlanta so what is it really like to be a junior developer well in order for me to explain like what my day-to-day is like I think it's really important for us to know what the product developments life cycle is like there's different phases of this life cycle like there's the ideation phase where these new ideas about what you're going to build where you're going to produce are made and then there's a design phase where you're designing what that's going to look like then there's a development phase which is where Engineers come in and actually build the product and then there's a testing phase where you have testing QA Engineers who test to make sure that it works that nothing is broken and then there's the deployment phase where it gets pushed up and deployed and becomes this real thing and then there's the review phase where you look back on all that you've done and accomplished and think like what else can we improve and then the cycle starts all over again the reason why I wanted to bring this up is because what you do as a software developer fits somewhere along this life cycle and your job is really about development making these technical contributions to building the product but you don't just do that you also have to collaborate with the designers you're also a part of the ideation like thinking through ideas because early on people want to know like is this idea that we have even feasible can we actually build it and that is a question for the engineers and so there's a lot of collaboration and there's a lot of involvement along all of the phases of this life cycle but for the most part Engineers are mostly in the development phase of things so now I'll talk a little bit about the team structure at my company we work on pretty large teams so there's like seven developers on our team we have two QA Engineers product manager as well as an engineering manager we have stand-ups every day whether we meet live or we do like a slack stand up Jack about what we're doing but the main thing that keeps us organized is our kanban board which is where we've kind of broken down the bigger projects that we're working on into these smaller chunks which we call tickets and we have these different columns on our kanban board that keep everything organized that we all know okay what is buildable what is currently being worked on what's being tested what's ready for product review and what's ready to be shipped out and I really really like it I feel like it's really clear what everyone is working on and it makes it really clear what you're working on and what needs to be worked on so if you finish your finish a ticket and you've shipped it then you can like very easily just pick up something new and you don't have to be like hey boss like what should I work on next like there's none of that you can just start working on the next thing and nobody tells you specifically what to do you can pick up at least the way things that work on my team you can pick up the next task if you feel comfortable working on it we do list our tickets by priority so that you know you know what is the most important thing that you that should be worked on next but for the most part it's not like somebody tells you what to do you just pick up a ticket and start working on it I guess that is kind of daunting as a junior developer when you first start because you might feel like this ticket that is probably already is huge how can I just start working on it and it's not like when I first started they just threw me in they're like okay Steph just start working on tickets a lot of the first few months I did pair work where I would work with someone else on a ticket and they would kind of guide me through the process of how to start it and you know all the way through completion and that was really exciting because I got to learn like what is the process that we do at our company okay so that kind of gives you a broad sense of like how things are structured and organized at work but specifically though what does a junior developer do I would say that the first three to four months of my job were really different from how they are now like as I mentioned the first couple of weeks on the job I was working on these kind of baby tickets and I was pairing on them so somebody was working with me just to learn you know the process of you know you know creating the brand and how you name your branch how you would like how you would actually merge the pr once it's ready to be merged after it's been qaed like the kind of process all of these processes and even though I was like already a little bit familiar with Git and GitHub because of group projects in my boot camp it's the kind of procedures are always different depending on where you work and so the first couple of weeks I just spent like getting to know those processes as well as just learning so I was given like I was told like just take a couple months just to learn angular because in my boot camp we learned react and so I didn't really know angular yet and so they're like yeah just here's an ultimate angular course you can look on udemy and just like basically self learn it kind of felt almost like being in a boot camp again except for it was a lot harder because I think angular is like a little bit more complex than react but yeah I spent the first couple of months just learning and I wasn't just doing those online courses I was doing the online courses but then I was also taking on smaller tickets to help me also learn this front-end framework so I remember the first few tickets I worked on like one of them was just updating link paths on the front end as well as like updating copy another one had to do with like fixing the functionality of one specific button I think the very first ticket I worked on which I paired on was just adding a couple of files to a git ignore so they were like these really really small tasks that I was picking up early on and they were really just meant for me to have something to work on to familiarize myself with when the processes as well as the code base because honestly like coming from a boot camp where you work on these little tiny baby projects which feel big at the time then going to a company where you're not familiar with the code and this is something that has been developed over a year's time right like over years with many many smart people working on it it's crazy like it's like a lot it's kind of overwhelming and so um I remember it would even just take me like just for that example I gave of like having to update a couple of links I remembered that taking me the entire day because I was just trying to figure out which file I needed to even make the update in make the changes in so what's expected of you as a junior developer especially in the beginning of your first job is just becoming familiar with the code base learning as much as you can almost like you're still a student asking for help when you need it but also like recognizing that there's a balance between you figuring stuff out on your own learning how to Google stack Overflow you know watch YouTube videos and then when you're really stuck knowing that you can ask for help and that this is all just part of the learning process as somebody who's just a junior and just starting out as I said I feel like the first three to four months were really different from the past three four months or so on this job since I've been working about seven months now and I think the main difference is just feeling a lot more comfortable with the processes I feel a lot more confident picking up like more challenging tickets now knowing how things are structured and how our app works and learning more about our actual products it helps me a lot to when I pick up tickets I feel like it's a lot easier for me to know like okay this is exactly what needs to get done I'm like kind of more or less familiar with this area of the code so I could just start working on it there's a lot less pre-work to figure out like even what to do but honestly I still have a lot of days where I pick up tickets and I'm like I've got no idea what I'm what I need to do and somehow I end up figuring it out in the end and it becomes a learning experience some examples of things I've worked on in the last couple of months include creating a flipper flag for like a new feature I worked on a couple of spikes and spikes are basically when you do research to figure out how something works I worked on one that was trying to figure out this API and how it worked but yeah I would say that on most of my day so going back to this day-to-day what is the job like on the day-to-day um we're picking up tickets there's a lot of time spent coding by myself but also you know we pay on things like collaborate with one of my teammates um but we also have meetings so we meet once a week as a whole team we go over our board and we call these refinements where we're kind of refining our work and talking about it and if there's issues it's a really good time to bring those up aside from these team meetings and coding we also at my company have guilds which are kind of like clubs so we have one for a front end we have one for backend they're really just a space for you to learn from like senior developers who will bring in ideas or bring in like new Frameworks or things like that or even just to just discuss issues that have come up in in our app and it's really just kind of like a free space to like raise anything that you want to talk about as you would kind of like in a club meeting and aside from guilds we also have ergs which are employee resource groups in January I actually became one of the leaders for ndrgmi company called aapi which is Asian American Pacific Islander and basically we have meetings where we plan events we plan kind of different kinds of engagements with our community and the whole purpose is really to build community Unity within the company another thing I wanted to bring up is I have some friends who are not developers not software Engineers who have said things along the lines of like oh it must be nice to just like work from home and like kind of implying that this job is kind of easy and like chill which it is pretty chill but it's definitely not an easy job I think it comes with a whole list of challenges and luckily I love being challenged and so it fits really nicely with like what I seek in a type of career but I would say it's not a job that's for everyone and that's kind of the point of this video that if you're kind of drawn to this career because of like the lifestyle that is really attractive and intriguing but you haven't thought much about like what is the job itself I just want you to think about that a little bit more because it's super challenging like you pick up things to pick up tickets and maybe not understand what you need to do or get frustrated because your code doesn't work and you're the one that needs to figure it out and I think it really the job requires you to be really passionate about problem solving you need to really enjoy technical challenges which I do like I love being stuck on something and like you know you can't put it down because you just have to figure it out like there's been times where I've literally not for work because I try to have work-life balance but on personal projects personal coding projects where I've stayed up till four in the morning because I literally am just like why doesn't this work I try not to bring that like energy into work because I want to have boundaries and everything but I still think that to for this job to work for you in the long term you have to be have that kind of personality or drive or passion to like like solving problems and specifically like solving technical problems I also think it's challenging because this job requires you to do a lot of self-learning so like I said before it's a lot of research it's a lot of reading documentation figuring things out on your own and that can be really stressful at times and if you're up for the challenge then you're definitely going to love this field and love this job but I don't think it's for everyone and I think that's totally okay and yeah I really hope that this video was helpful for you to give you a sense of what it's like to be a software engineer and specifically a junior developer in case that is the career transitioning career path that you're interested in and I hope that this was a more realistic sense of what this job is like compared to Lifestyle videos and what you see on Tick Tock and other spaces in social media don't forget to like this video if you found it helpful and consider subscribing to my channel if you're interested in these topics thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: stephf

Views: 42,022

Keywords: software engineer, software engineering, software developer, junior developer, shecodes experience, female developer, female coder, coding bootcamp, bootcamp grad, best coding bootcamps, computer programming, software, coding, computer science, day in the life of a software engineer, computer engineering, how to become a software engineer, software development, the harsh reality of being a software engineer, what professional software engineers do, junior developer job

Id: jSWDACda6S8

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023