4 questions to ask yourself before becoming a Software Engineer
Have any of you pretended to be a hacker for the CIA as a kid when you found an old computer? I remember I did. The idea of hacking into a government agency as a secret agent always excited me.
However, being a software engineer is not like that. In reality, you spend hours looking for a one-line fix and get your code shat on by other developers in your team and even random strangers online. In high school, I did well in computer science or computing science which was what it was called back then. If I had known what I knew now after two and a half years of being a developer, I would have still studied it. As a matter of fact, I would’ve done more. More in the sense that I would’ve asked more questions in class or worked on more personal projects instead of getting drunk and stuck with a two-day hangover.
Maybe you’re reading this because you aren’t sure or maybe it’s just because you have no idea what you want to do and coding seems like an exciting thing to be a part of. Whatever your story is, here are four questions that encapsulate whether or not you really have what it takes to become a software engineer.
- Are you able to learn new things on your own?
This is a pretty important one. More than anything you will need to enjoy learning new things on your own. Not only are there many different programming languages but each of these will have things native to their own. There are also hundreds of different frameworks and libraries available which can be useful for the projects you are working on or the product you are developing. So just bear that in mind.
- Do you think you will be able to spend hours on a problem that requires a trivial fix?
At my first job, there was this JavaScript issue which took me two whole days to figure out. The issue was about columns on a table not being hidden when the option was set to. I remember stepping through the code over about 100 times to find that the issue was actually in the CSS. The CSS class hadn’t been added to the scss file. Therefore, when the callback function was executed it didn’t know what had to be removed. 🤦♀️
- Are you able to handle criticism about your code from your colleagues daily?
When starting out, you’re not going to know a lot. You will have trouble navigating the codebase, learning good coding practices, coding standards, and the whole #! See what I did there. If you don’t know, #! is also known as shebang. The character sequence at the start of a script. As the only female developer in my company, I have learned to not take things so personally. To be able to accept and handle discussions on my code and take other peoples’ opinions into consideration, not just my own. There is no my way or the highway type of thinking. We’re all one entity.
- Can you see yourself doing this for the next five years?
You need to have goals and you need to be able to see yourself doing this for at least if not longer than five years. In two years, I hope to be a senior developer designing software all over the world. I’m currently an intermediate. I still have so much to learn and a long way to go but I’m so excited about what is to come. 🙏
If you answered yes to all of these questions. Congratulations! You’re definitely ready to be a software engineer. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. There are still so many career paths in IT that you can be a part of. One last thing, although there are many struggles that come with this career, there are even more opportunities. The future is <code/>
