Any Software Developers here?

[TranceCommunity]

This is just a general question if youre a Software Engineer.

I assume youve went to College / Uni and then onto a job.

Whats it actually like? Is it what you expected while you where studying in College?

What does your day consist of?

Just went back to College. Studied Engineering first but started all over again and now study Software Development.

Thanks in Advance.

 

[Rakk]

Yes, I've been a software developer for while

Went to Uni (where I did Maths with a computing sudsid course), didn't know what I was going to do when I started uni, didn't get a proper job for a while, worked briefly In Games Workshop for a bit whilst deciding what I wanted to do lol.
Then I started as a tester and from there eventually progressed into development, so it wasn't exactly a straight route into software dev

So my day, it consists of doing some actual programming work (VB.NET and SQL mostly for me), some designing of solutions, some arguing with client services (that's a dept of ours that talks to our clients so that we don't have to) about what this thing I'm doing should or should not do, some discussions about stuff we're doing, some more programming work, some unit testing, some wondering how the heck the client managed to get one of our products to do whatever it did cos it shouldn't have been possible, a lot of Googling to find solutions to stuff (why bother writing new stuff if someone has done it before), wondering why none of those solutions you've found on Google actually work with what you're doing, and then at the end of the day wondering what you've spent all day on cos you seem to achieved nothing worthwhile

 

[TranceCommunity]

Cheers for the reply.

Honestly is it difficult or stressful work? Ive had conflicting reports.

Some have said its great being paid to sit in front of a pc all day others have said its stressful.

 

[Rakk]

Honestly is it difficult or stressful work? Ive had conflicting reports.

It probably depends on the company you're working for to be honest.

The companies I've worked for it's generally not been too stressful, however Aug/Sep were very stressful this year due to the fact that about 3 of our clients wanted big things done all at the same time and we had about 2 months to do about 4 months worth of expected work.

So for me it's mostly unstressful.
Sometimes it can be difficult finding solutions to things, but that's what keep my mind thinking, if I'm not thinking I get bored and easily distracted

 

[Wozza63]

Im currently in first year of college (just started) doing AS Computing, AS Maths, and AS Physics, all are relevant to software engineering as thats what I'm interested in

Majority of companies like AS/Alevel maths and Physics from what I hear is also an added bonus, Physics and maths are both very difficult already, although computing (the main programming bit) isn't too bad at the moment although thats basically because we have to start the course from scratch as programming isn't taught in schools at all

 

[stebro297]

Defintely depends on the company, as well as the customer .

If you get a badly organised company as well as a customer that doesn't really know what they want and keeps changing their mind it can be "challenging".

Overall though i really don't find it stressful at all. Organisation is key i'd say

 

[mdwh]

Cheers for the reply.

Honestly is it difficult or stressful work? Ive had conflicting reports.

Some have said its great being paid to sit in front of a pc all day others have said its stressful.

Can't it be all of the above?

I don't think it's worse than other jobs in terms of stress, but is in an area that I enjoy (I mean, I can get stressed by something not working when I'm writing code for fun at home, but I still do it). Having some level of difficulty in a job is good, otherwise there's no challenge.

 

[brukin]

Having worked in software development in as stebro297 says "a badly organised company" for over 10 years I can say the stress level comes and goes. Our management often submit specifications in the form of 1 paragraph emails, client ask for silly features that the sales guys promise before consulting the developers and other joys. But in bigger company you can be swamped with authorisation/paperwork/audit trails and more red tape than china celebrating a national holiday. When looking for a position after completing a course one thing to make sure they will do is invest in you. Some companies can be scared to put you through training courses as they are fearful of wasting money as you run off with your new training to a new employer. Of course a lot can be learned from a decent textbook on a new technology or programming language/environment but often a paid course can help a lot more. I've been fobbed off with "Just google it" or a limited budget for a couple of text books and I think it has stunted my progress as a developer. Just making do with guides and examples from the internet can introduce you to bad habits and inefficient solutions so just need to make sure that your investment of time and effort working for the company is met with a return investment in training.

But sometimes when the requests come in all with the same "urgent" "contract winning" prioritization then stress can be high and long hours will be needed and expected by employers.

 

[iBushay]

I did some work for a company near me for about a month, it mostly meant a 9-5 fixing errors in an already built program, debugging and validating etc, not the most entertaining job, but definitely satisfying when you solve a problem!

 

[SimonG]

Cheers for the reply.

Honestly is it difficult or stressful work? Ive had conflicting reports.

Some have said its great being paid to sit in front of a pc all day others have said its stressful.

First off, I do not have a degree, I have taken an intro programming course, but 95% of my knowledge is self taught.
I never tried to imagine what it'd be like. While learning to program, I programmed. Now that it's my profession, I program.
If you like writing code then it's great!

My day usually consists of fixing bugs, which may or may not be hard to track. A lot of it is problem solving,
which often requires you to think "outside the box" for alternative(better) solutions (threading & library bugs are common here).
The other part is developing new features,
which in my opinion is the most fun as then you get to go a bit wild and write a lot of new code (that you later have to fix bugs in!).

Sometimes, close to the end of our release cycle(once a year) things get a bit crazy and it can be pretty stressful.
All code we write also needs to reviewed by another member of our team, which may be hard for some people to receive constant criticism on their work.
So it's a constant struggle finding the "best" way to do things (this may be using a 'worse' solution because it's much faster to implement), so in my
opinion it's no slack job.

It is a pretty stressful job in my opinion as it requires your constant attention, there's not much downtime where you can relax.
(compare to retail where you might have "calm" hours where there aren't many customers), it's a constant stream of work. This can be taxing some days,
especially when you're having some issues in your personal life.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

Simon