What Is It Like to Be a Software Engineer? | Career Crush

0:00Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

0:30This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. Coding is magic. And if you're like me, you probably stare in awe at the people who engineer all of the amazing digital experiences that we're staring at pretty much every single second of the day.

1:12Even this video you're watching right now had some sort of coding involved. But I don't really know what it is. In my head, it's kind of just these people in a dark room typing as fast as they can creating the matrix and they're hacking the mainframe in the system that's pretty much like all I think about when I think of software engineering I can't help but wonder what is it like to be a full-time coder what is it like to be a software engineer.

1:51That feeling, that gratification of figuring out how to do something or solving a bug or whatever is like unmatched. That's Lindsay Redd. She's a software engineer that's worked at some of the coolest tech companies out there. Slack, Lyft and now Stripe. As a software engineer, she's part of the magic that makes these products work. First question, does her job actually look like... I mean, there, I do do that. Like that is, I don't hack, but like black screen, green text. I don't prefer those particular colors. You can change that. But like that is definitely part of the job, but it's very, it's like probably 50%.

2:37A lot of the job is very collaborative and not solo work at all. Usually my day starts with looking through what I have to do for the day. So I know a lot of software teams use task management tools. My team specifically uses Jira, and we use a ticketing system. And then coding, of course. But you code, you test, you deploy your code, you monitor your code, make sure things are working. Do people actually grow up wanting to be coders? Like, did Lindsay always know that she wanted to be a software engineer? No, not at all. I didn't even know what it was until I was in college. I wanted to be a doctor, like in high school, or a biomechanical engineer.

3:28My dad's a doctor, my mom's a chemical engineer, And so something with STEM I knew was going to be my path. I went to Stanford, and Stanford's a huge computer science school. So a lot of my friends were taking intro to computer science courses. I, you know, I had never coded. I just really didn't know what it was. But everyone was having a great time and seemed to find it really interesting. So around my sophomore year, I decided to take a class in computer science. and my mentality was if I like this class I'll take the next class and then after that if I like that class then I'll major in it and that's basically what happened so.

4:08I love the version of peer pressure at Stanford which is like you have to take a computer science class. Yeah yeah definitely not what I was expecting but I'm glad it happened. I definitely just stumbled into it. It's lucky I think that I went to a school that focuses so heavily on it. What were those classes like? Like when you first started doing it, was it something that you were like scared of or like intimidated by or was it like kind of accessible? What did that feel like for you? I enjoyed the classes because a lot of it is, I mean, you're actually coding, right? And like, that is what I currently do right now on the job.

4:44And I liked that direct application of skills. Like I am learning things that I will eventually use in my career. So yeah, it was fun. It was like, At first, it's a lot of puzzles. You code like a little robot that navigates. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

5:29This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. Maze, like it's simple stuff. I think my final project in my first class was building an extremely basic Facebook. Okay, I need a little bit of explanation. What are the different types of software engineers out there?

6:12The basics are front-end, which is more like web development or yeah like what you see on your computer screen and then back end which is more of like servers and algorithms and things like that that you don't see as a like user but that help power the front end and there are people who are full stack who do both of those things there's infrastructure engineering which is a lot of building out services like microservices or servers or monolithic servers or I don't know observability pipelines all kinds of things that need to sit underneath like the back end layer in order for it to work if that makes any sense a lot of developer tooling is considered infrastructure just things that kind of keep the upper layers like working if that makes sense no matter what type of engineering you choose, Lindsay says that when you're ready to search for a job, you should be ready for an intense interview process, one that takes a lot of studying.

7:22Studying for software engineering interviews is a whole ordeal in and of itself. And at the time, I didn't really understand that. And so I didn't study well. And I don't know, Luckily, I had some skills under my belt that served me in my interview, but it made it a lot difficult just because I was very confused about how this was going to translate into my job. You have to basically start studying before you even know if you've got an interview lined up. Is that right? Yeah. And I mean, a lot of companies understand that that is part of the process. So recruiters are very, in my experience anyway, like flexible and giving you like as much time as you want really to study.

8:10For my current job, I remember asking my recruiter if I could have four or five weeks to study before I actually did the interview. And they were like, oh, yeah, I totally get it. But a lot of people, you know, once they decide, OK, I'm going to like switch jobs or I need to go find a job. They know like that means like, oh, I need to start studying tomorrow. Are you coding? So you're coding in front of the interviewee like live?

8:36In most cases, I know Lyft does an interview where you get like an hour to code some like a small project on your own. The interviewer doesn't have to be there so you can focus. But I think in all other interviews that I've been in and that I hear my friends are in, you're coding in front of someone or pair programming with someone during the interview. It's a lot of pressure. And it's interesting because, I mean, you do pair program on the job. So interviews that involve pair programming, I think, are really great, honestly. um but the kind of just coding and someone's watching and like judging your performance is not typical of the job a lot of it you're just doing on your own so it's also I was thinking about like how software engineering and like the tech industry in general it's very it's predominantly white it's predominantly male would you mind talking a little bit about what it's like to kind of navigate an industry like that.

9:43Yeah, it's hard. It's definitely a struggle. You definitely get people who doubt your skills, doubt your skill set. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

10:27This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

10:57And undermine your work, which sucks, and it's hard, and I think it's more work than, you know, the white dude kind of software engineer has to go through to find a team and find a company that will work for you. You know, what does diversity look like at your company? How does your company think about or treat diversity and inclusion? Are there other people at the company who look like me who are doing well and feel good? That's definitely a piece of my research. And it's hard work in and of itself to kind of vet those things and figure those things out. But it's kind of necessary in order for me to be the best employee or engineer that I can be.

11:42Okay, let's talk about money. What should I expect to get paid in a software engineering role? If you're in, you know, one of the kind of coastal locations, San Francisco, New York LA like some of these larger more established tech hubs out of college if you are not making a hundred thousand dollars at least you're probably being underpaid or could at least find a company that would pay you more I'm not sure what that looks like if you're finding a job in Atlanta for example it might look very different down there and I'm not familiar. I would also say talk to your friends. I think people don't talk about how much they make enough, which I think lends to a lot of pay inequity in the industry.

12:39It's what needs to happen in order to hold these companies that a lot of times don't want to pay you fairly accountable. Software engineering is almost nothing like I expected it to be. It's not just people typing away as fast as they can in a dark room. It's a lot more about teamwork. It's a lot more about collaboration and communication. If you're coming away from this video thinking that you want to pursue software engineering, it's good to know that it's not magic, but it is hard work. What people are looking for when you're an intern on a team is your ability to communicate, both verbal and written communication, and your ability to problem solve.

13:18What kind of questions do you ask? Do you make sure you ask questions to solve your problems? How fast are you able to ramp up and learn new technologies, new skills, new languages quickly? And then, you know, what kind of energy do you bring to the team? What is it like working with you?

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