Career Questions

I'm doing this career project for a class of mine and want to ask some of you guys who are in the software engineering field a few questions:

What are your favorite things about your position and why?
What are your least favorite things about your position and why?
Why did you decide on this career field?
If you can change anything about your career what would it be?

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Comments

paul78

Ok - I'll kick it off. I don't currently work in software engineering so I'll answer the questions based on my most recent software engineering role. Also - I suspect that you would get very different answers based on each respondent's career path, current position, the types of software being developed.

Good luck with your project and feel free to ask for clarifications.

1. What are your favorite things about your position and why?

I enjoy solving business problems with technology. In particular, I enjoy the intricacies and details involved with building solutions which need to be highly-available, scalable, and secure. Because I'm in a leadership role, I find gratification in helping to mentor and build teams. Software engineering however isn't always about building a new product or solution. Some of my most favourite challenges is to take solutions with technical debt that limit the ability to scale or add new functionality and transform them to modern scalable and secure solutions. Think of that as the software engineering equivalent of rebuilding an airplane while it's flying in the air.

What are your least favorite things about your position and why?

I work in finserv/fintech industries and there are occasionally some very tight deadlines or business pressures. So there could be long hours and lots of travel. In the past, when working for less than profitable businesses, I have to lay off people (although that's not directly related to software engineering)

Why did you decide on this career field?

Because I really liked computers as a kid. It was very new and the possibilities were endless. Also - back when I started, if you wanted something, you kinda had to write it yourself.

If you can change anything about your career what would it be?

Hmm, I think I probably would have finished my college degree. Also, I think that I would have liked to have spent more time developing customer relationship skills.

yoba222

I don't foresee too many responses from software engineers, if any at all, but maybe you'll get lucky.