- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?
I was in finance and a lot of the job was getting repetitive. Update excel sheet X times every X days, etc. You soon want to automate the boring repetitive stuff but formulas in excel only get you so far. So you reach to VBA that exposes you more to coding. Then you reach limits there and you look at scripting languages like Python. Ultimately, I decided I enjoyed that part way more and wanted to do it full time.
- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?
I work on backend services. I think the job is better than probably a lot of others. However, it's not all that rosy all the time. On-call is something you probably don't hear about before going into the field, and I think it negatively affects quality of life significantly. The beauty around software is that it runs all the time without you having to do anything, but that also means stuff can break all the time at all hours and you might be tasked to fix it.
The agile work framework is pretty common and I don't like. It's very common to have daily meetings (they call them standups) where you have to tell everyone, what you did yesterday, and what you're doing today. Feels super micro.
More recently, D&I activism has taken engineering by storm. It's hard these days to focus on your job and role without getting dragged into this topic. Hiring based on physical traits (i.e. discrimination) is live and well (and encouraged/required) at tech companies, especially in engineering departments.
Lastly, the hiring practices in this field are complicated. Hiring is predominantly based on obscure algorithm and data structure problems, things that 99% of people don't care about in their day-to-day job. This makes finding new jobs a bit more difficult, because you actually have to allocate a good amount of time to learn these things again.
- How did you break that first-job barrier?
I went to a bootcamp and did a lot of algorithm practice problems. The job I ended up getting was through a referral.
- What were you doing before this?
excel heavy work
- Any tips for the rest of us?
You should generally enjoy problem solving or you wont enjoy it that much.
I was in finance and a lot of the job was getting repetitive. Update excel sheet X times every X days, etc. You soon want to automate the boring repetitive stuff but formulas in excel only get you so far. So you reach to VBA that exposes you more to coding. Then you reach limits there and you look at scripting languages like Python. Ultimately, I decided I enjoyed that part way more and wanted to do it full time.
- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?
I work on backend services. I think the job is better than probably a lot of others. However, it's not all that rosy all the time. On-call is something you probably don't hear about before going into the field, and I think it negatively affects quality of life significantly. The beauty around software is that it runs all the time without you having to do anything, but that also means stuff can break all the time at all hours and you might be tasked to fix it.
The agile work framework is pretty common and I don't like. It's very common to have daily meetings (they call them standups) where you have to tell everyone, what you did yesterday, and what you're doing today. Feels super micro.
More recently, D&I activism has taken engineering by storm. It's hard these days to focus on your job and role without getting dragged into this topic. Hiring based on physical traits (i.e. discrimination) is live and well (and encouraged/required) at tech companies, especially in engineering departments.
Lastly, the hiring practices in this field are complicated. Hiring is predominantly based on obscure algorithm and data structure problems, things that 99% of people don't care about in their day-to-day job. This makes finding new jobs a bit more difficult, because you actually have to allocate a good amount of time to learn these things again.
- How did you break that first-job barrier? I went to a bootcamp and did a lot of algorithm practice problems. The job I ended up getting was through a referral.
- What were you doing before this? excel heavy work
- Any tips for the rest of us? You should generally enjoy problem solving or you wont enjoy it that much.