“An Industry Guide to Becoming a Software Engineer” by Bill Langenberg

By Mohamed Mohamed Saint Paul College

1st Guide: Never stop learning, Want to have a great career, enjoy what you do, and be at least some where successful? Make sure you never stop learning new things to become a better software engineer. I will not talk too deep into this point since am not doing software engineering but I must reiterate how important it is to keep fresh with updated skills. After all there is a reasons software engineers tend to make a decent salary; it's not easy to do what they do. However I think if you get t deep in it, the career is totally fulfilling and presents something interesting every day.

I am network engineer focused with technologies on the Microsoft Associate for almost 3 years. I'm also not new to this software engineer. Holding professional jobs in this time span has allowed me to work with a slew of diverse professionals and allowed me to soak up and experience a lot about being a software engineer too. Since my experience roughly dates to the new millennium, I feel a lot of what I have to say holds relevant today as opposed to experience from writing on a mainframe system,

Best site for software engineering. Followed behind this I like Monster.com. (There is also Stack Overflow careers, but I believe it's by invitation only. In the future, consider getting a Stack Overflow account, and begin building reputation to get an invitation to this site as well.) Both Dice and Monster have search agents that you can set up that will send you emails of new jobs in search areas and locations you specify (i.e. Orlando, FL .NET Software Engineering Jobs). Let the results come to you rather than constantly pulling them. You can fine tune the search agents so you do not get bombarded with Senior level positions requiring 10 years of experience. Jump on the opportunity to be the first to send in your application and resume for new positions. Believe it or not, many companies will look to fill positions where a tenured employee has just left and a replacement is needed quickly. Remember the old saying, "the early bird gets the worm". Looking around at jobs on these sites will help you get a feel of requirements, salary, location, etc. Be forewarned that filling out all of the information on these sites is time consuming, so be prepared to set aside some time. However the effort could pay dividends in getting that job you desire.

HOW TO BE PRODUCTIVE: BALANCE SPEED vs. SELF-SUFFICIENCY When you take a software engineering job, your employer is going to expect you to be productive. The best performing engineers are able to balance asking teammates for answers to get unblocked quickly against spending time to figure out the answer themselves. A general rule of thumb is to spend 30-60 minutes trying to figure something out yourself before interrupting someone else, unless it’s a trivial question he or she can answer out of hand. Try to group your questions together and answer them in a contiguous block of time.