My *Honest* Advice to Aspiring Software Engineers

📗 My favorite books for *Self Development* and *Understanding the World Around Us* : 📗

A story about underdogs and facing adversity

How to re-think the way you approach life (live with less anxiety)

The science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior

Speaker in video: @SundasKhalid (Go check her out! Her channel is amazing :D)

📧[CONTACT]📧

[Geomaverick]

I get what you are saying but working in the tech industry for just money is actually the right thing. You could be working in any job and any job will be miserable after about 5 years of doing it but would you rather be working in the industry where you are bored and miserable for $20 an hour or Would you rather be working in an industry where you're miserable making $70 an hour?

[Astral_Dusk]

I remember when $90k was a huge bump in salary and then a year later realized I was actually being underpaid lmao

[Astral_Dusk]

Had a Meta recruiter get annoyed that I didn't want to move to the Bay Area, I guess a lot of people were saying no? Why's it gotta be onsite? Coders work better in their coding cave.

[sharabeshj]

Wow whatever you said about expectations now are so accurate. AI won't replace SDE whereas SDE using AI for improved productivity will replace old SDEs

[Sauce-ke]

Money is main reason for tech jobs. Passion wont pay your bills. Even if you're burn out, if the pay is good then your job is basically paying for your passion. Even if you hate the job at tech, its a lot better than going to the job that you love but pay a lot less. Maybe you can do that if your family is stable and they support you.

[alexcipriani]

this is a bunch of nonsense there’s no junior engineer making anywhere close to $500k even at FANG

[estebanperalta]

Quick advice for those who came because the thumbnail: SWE is science, is hard as hell and not for everybody and that's why you can make 6 figure (after years of experience, it will be not like that in the beginning), it's not a cashgrab, you don't get pay by typing stuff in a computer but to solve COMPLEX PROBLEMS, but if you love it then do it. If you're afraid about AI, It wont replace you, if you're smart enouigh it will be a tool that makes you more productive, just like frameworks and libraries does today.

[ShahidFoy]

To be honest, being a software engineer is probably one of the easiest jobs I've ever had. Once you've put in 10k hours, it gets easier from there. The catch is you gotta be obsessed with what you do most people do it for the money but for some of us its pretty much our lives so at some point its not work it's just another interesting problem to solve. The hardest part is office politics. Personally, the fewer people gatekeeping, the better. Practice being more like an opensouce project. Prod support should also get used to trying different solutions because that's pretty much the bread and butter in software dev

[patrick_nilan]

I want to be a computer engineer and I know it won’t be pretty, but I feel like it’s better then a lot of other industries

[thephoenix-poit]

Ok for those who think that these people make 500k, let me tell you their true base salary isn't gonna be 300k, 400k, or 500k. What I think Pooja leaves out is that these "salaries" are using a combo of RSUs(restricted stock units), bounses and their salary. To truly see how much they make per year just ask their base not their total compensation

[fortimusprime]

I think I am one of those that is in this industry for all the wrong reasons. I was basically “pushed” into this by my parents because “it makes good money”. However, no one ever told me the amount of work it would take to actually stand out enough to get an internship. The competition is insane. The LeetCode part is the one I despise. And I’ve never done personal projects for the fun of it.

I wonder if I should change careers as I go. I’m gonna take a course on Computer Graphics this semester and I hope that ignites a passion I never knew. All I loved about computers was doing things with the software itself; not make the software. Video Editing, AutoCAD, Blender, you name it. But CG is something I always loved about computers. We’ll see. But great and detailed video highlighting the realities of this career.

[EbonySeraphim]

Sorry folks, this video falls flat in terms of deeper details. This isn't an insult, but the problem here is that these perspectives are coming from someone who's career timeline for this industry started during the pandemic. How do they what's normal when what it was like before then wasn't directly realized and only heard of? The dumbest thing that was said was towards the end of the video:

"I know there's different levels to software engineering, but because new things come out so quickly, sometimes junior engineers are the expert." -- oh lord, how false this is. I'm not conflating "engineer that has been around for a while" for a solid principal engineer either, but there is a very clearly gap between engineers who know their stuff, that typically end up senior or principal at some point, and a junior engineer and it's not even close. A junior engingeer maybe has less than a week, maybe even two days before a senior engineer is going to be more productive with some new technology and outpace them exponentially from there in actually solving the problems at hand. And the senior engineer will have the capacity to more quickly see if a technology actually doesn't address or solve the problems needed. They can identify quickly if a tool matches what they need to do, and don't waste time fighting against a tool that wasn't right in the first place. They understand what new tools are capable of, and exploit it quickly. I don't know if I can explain it any better and quickly, but don't ever carry a "better than thou" attitude vs someone that senior unless they've very very demonstrably shown a lack of adjustability. That they don't know some API name isn't signs of ignorance, they know the same API in 3-4 other technologies in the last 5 years that do the same thing and the differences between them, and you know only the one. If you falsely think they are "worse" than you and do something that reveals that to them, or even others, you'll look the fool and that engineer will not want to work with you.

Next AI: sorry, if AI is a necessary tool in your job, then your job is doing something stupidly repetive and simple enough for a language model to see and repeat. If a company has a "proprietary" LLM for their own problems and repeated solutions, AI is an approach that could speed up productivity but it has a fatal flaw: code maintenance. An AI bootstrapping you with thousands of lines of code towards implementing something is great. When you take that, make edits to it to more precisely do what you need it to do, then create a pull-request for someone else to review, how efficient is it for that next engineer to have to dig through thousands of lines of code being assured of what your edits are versus the AI? Or do have to fully check the code then and there? That's were you lose time. The true solution for repetitiveness there is having your own code generator that models your problems and solutions as data, and then your code generator is essentially a solution data transformation into code that is generated at build time and never checked in. No one edits it, because if they do, it's instant maintenance nightmare. If someone wants to know what's up, they look no further than the model 99/100.

Also, get rid of the concept of a 10x engineer. Seniority and knowledge of your own companies tools, and approaches, and global "requirements", and sometimes just the power and influence to not be questioned and challenged what you are doing is what allows people to be 10x in certain spaces but not actually be that good of an engineer. If any engineer views themselves as 10x any level of competent engineer on their team, they should feel uncomfortable and immediately understand what the problem is and ideally identify it. "Why don't other members of the team know X/Y?" "Why aren't they able to make changes to these areas of the code where I am?" If they come to the conclusion "because I'm better" they're absolutely wrong. Standout engineers in teams I've been on are at best 2x the next, maybe 3x the next if they also put in very long hours and work in an area they are super familiar with and others just aren't. Some engineers that have appeared to be standouts in the past, but then you realize they are just holding onto simple information and not revealing their sources and methods that anyone else on the team could run.

[BangMaster]

I mean, every year, around 100k to 130k People graduate with a Comp-Sci degree across US, and another 30k to 35k People do a Bootcamp certificate. So as a new graduate, you are competing with like 130k to 165k People for a Tech Job. And right now, the Economy is very bad, especially for entry level folks who are just starting their career.

[johnguillen]

I'm definitely into software engineering. I'm introvert and would love to work on my own but I know that meetings are a process to and that I don't mind. I've been working in a field where I deal with people on a nonstop basis. At the moment, I'm on a short term disability and doing some video tutorials on coding with HTML and CSS and I love the fact that I'm home alone and not at work. I'm still working on these videos and love it. It's frustrating at times when a code don't work but I love solving the problem. As long as I make more than what I'm making now I'll be happy.

[SavageScientist]

Great video, you are one of the lucky ones. At 46 years old i think i may clear 100k as a developer in software security (dev-sec-ops).

[nylagaston]

I wish we could change the conversation from everyone saying go into tech because you love it not just for the money, when that's the only engineering field that people say that to. I work with Civil, and mechanical engineers and they all chose it because of job security not because of their passion for constructing roads. My advice, go into something that you find interesting enough to pursue, will pay you well, and won't leave you feeling burned out all the time. You can do either or both, up to you!!

[theashenone]

One of the reasons I've staying in a Bank since 2020 making $350K (with an equal annual bonus), while my batchmates are in MAANG making $500-$700K, was because of peace of mind.

Never seen anyone from tech team laid off in these 4 years, tech stack is decent, management keeps encouraging us to experiment and innovate stuff, and enough paid leaves.

They keep saying i have no aspirations but all these times, especially in the current market, I realised that the best way to beat the matrix is to not play it at all.

Having a stable 9-5 with good tech stack has it's perks over the hustle culture of volatile, but highly paid positions in MAANG

[neto]

Honestly yeah, sadly this gives a bad to rep actual engineers. Folks being in an environement like this is demanding, sometime long hours debbuging something or refactoring some code. It takes time and a lot of effort is not all about vacations and do nothing at the office.

[mr.random]

Dang most US remote jobs don’t allow you to work outside the country

[Someoneelse_XD]

Pretty accurate. I am sure we will see a lot of money chasers leaving the industry. It's actually good, I have been in the industry for over 10 years and the quality of leetcoding, money focused bad engineers has really made it less enjoyable. Not saying that money isn't important, but we are engineers with an eye on quality and craftsmanship.