Reality of Software Development 

This might sound elitist but if a company is ready to lock you in fast, chances are they didn't vet their staff and overall your experience (as a junior/intern) will suffer.

The only flags i watch for is green in my bank account, les gooo.

me too leeesss gooooo

What are red flags?

​@@coldestbeer sounds more like less-of-a-go.

Thank you so much for your wonderful comment! :) I feel like a lot of content doesn't accurately represent us!

@@bigboxSWE I agree that a lot of content does not accurately represent software engineering. Software engineering itself requires applying engineering principles to proof your software will work. (As opposed to proving written code functions as expected) There's a lot of people who call themselves software engineers but are instead, senior level developers. Still a note-worthy profession, but definitely not the same. Some people believe they're the same. Though I haven't met a developer yet who can produce engineering level quality products unless they spend 3x (wet finger estimation) the resources. What are your thoughts on that?

​@@msc8382 This is a bizarre comment

@@sneer0101 why is it bizarre for you? Through job applications and degrees, it's very clear there's a difference between programmers and engineers. This video describes a programmer's common day, not that of an engineer. I'm particularily weirded out by the fact that the core component of engineering is not mentioned; how the engineering principles are applied and when. That's the most important aspect doing engineering; applying engineering principles.

I've been a dev for 9 years now... 90% of your time will be spent figuring out how someone else wrote a system and the other 10% will be spent fixing their bugs.

These types of videos tend to either really sugar coat the job or really make it sound terrible. I'm glad to finally see a video that splits the difference and shows how, like any job, it has it's ups and downs. It also largely depends on the organization you work for. I see so many people talk about 60 hour weeks and burnout when most of my jobs have been the opposite to the point where I'm bored. As a general rule, the people making the most noise are also the most unhappy. It all comes down to where you work and your management. If you're a consultant, it comes down to the culture at your firm and the culture of your client.

​@@Monochrome93Did you do something in particular to get the "boring" ones?

What you're describing is 100% of where most of the industry is headed, (bar unicorns and Big-Tech) most companies treat Software Development like their IT department (e.g as a cost centre) even some B2B SaaS orgs I've worked at view it the same. It's quite dreadful and leads to a net negative for everyone.

I'm literally just about to start writing some mocks I started on last night, but could not get to because of stand-up, followed by a emergency call, followed by a planning meeting with my whole agile team, even though I have another meeting with my 'HR manager' in about an hour. I'm just trying to get out of the mindset that actually writing code is the most important thing.

Thats why in 2023 Google, Amazon, Fasebook and Twitter fired 2/3 of devs - and nothing changes LOL

​@@kishirisu1268Big tech fired 75% of their staff because they focused far too much on growth rather than profit. Most big tech ran on VC and other investor money sources. When the fed hiked interest rates up, investors started demanding to see ROI or else they'd stop funneling money down the sinkholes these companies were. So the job cuts were first up, except with growth happening far too fast there were way too many teams involved (too many cooks). The result is these companies shedding employees and then shedding features, becoming full of bugs because the product was built with the intention of having way more people maintaining it. Industry grew way too fast and you're gonna see it happen again with AI

​@@ApexGaledo recommend software engineering? I'm considering nursing, business or software engineering

Thank you so much for your wonderful comment. Your first 4-5 months as a Jr Developer is absolutely brutal. I had around 1 year of intern experience going into my first full-time gig, and even that didn't help as much. My first merge request (we used GitLab) took me 2 months, and it was adding a csv parser in an import functionality in our java monolith (even with pair programming and a lot of help from senior devs!)

@@BusinessWolf1 should have read the job application 😂

this is exactly what Im experiencing right now. been a week since my first day and still cant understand shit

I'm curious. What was the most challenging about that first merge request?

hahahah thank you! that's why i called reality

Full stack.. Must love the buzzwords, lol

@@justinedse8435why? What’s wrong with the word?

As ive heard fullstack doesnt really exist

@@puch9830 it does, but a hundred times as many people claim to be full stack as actually are full stack. Which is weird - it's not like full stack means you're "better".

Yeah. I love the creativeness of coding but watching this put me off x100000

Did someone tell you at some point that being compensated monetarily for your labor is supposed to be “fun”? The vast majority of human beings do not enjoy their day to day tasking because the vast majority of things that need to be done aren’t “fun”. If you spend your life pursuing “fun” at work you will probably spend your whole life in pursuit

​@@nyynetails it shouldn't be that way, that's the problem genius

@@Serusshi so every janitor scrap metal collector and rape detective "should be" having a great time were it not for the "man" XD yeah nah bruh once you graduate come see me about "fun". Thats fugazi shit. Yuore allowed 18ish years of fun then 52 years of fun weekends if ur lucky. make the most of em

that's because you can't have good software written by a bunch of monkeys pooping out code with no coordination. If you actually worked as a software dev you would appreciate most of the things mentioned because they help you and others. Nobody is an omnibus that can look at a 1000 file codebase and know everything about it, documentation is needed, meetings are needed to help you progress because you WILL get stuck

Yep, been there and done that! I'm actually at an org with a very competent QA team, so when they do find something they usually work with the PM to see if the bug is 'worth it'.

oh my God that sounds terrifying, Im 18 and aspire to be a SWE but that just very slightly scares me

Oh yep... The company infrastructure, and god forbid you're trying to change some documentation!

I love "Slack-professionalism", just shifting tasks off to other people until someone is stuck with it

@here 😂

Yes that is quite true as well! This video was geared towards more Junior Developers, I noticed in teams where everyone had over >3 years of experience pair programming was nonexistent, and if you did have issues you can pretty reasonably solve it over Slack or GitLab/GitHub comments.

If I see another 15+ case if-else tree pushed I'm going to cry

I would have to make a separate video on your first 1 month as a Junior Developer, it can be so brutal! Thank you so much for your lovely comment. :) I hope I brought some value to your YouTubing sesh

As a junior your code will suck, you will fumble, but if you were hired fresh out of college then your employer will be expecting this. As long as you learn from your mistakes and improve then you won't get fired.

15980 years later "I have no idea what I'm doing and why I'm not fired yet" 11 of 10 SWE senior principal CEO of company X lol

With 4+ years under my belt I keep my desk sparse so when I get told to pack it up I’m ready in 5 minutes

Hmm, even with years of experience, your code may still suck depending on what you have to program and if you ever did that task or not. You might get something I would call "base (in)-competence", depending on how you spend your years, however, this will not change this fact. I do programming since I was 13, and this still happens all the time and I think, it will never end. If a company fires developers for writing bad code then there won't be any developers in the future anymore.

Or let me give you a practical example: We developed a finance API years ago with Java. During that time, it wasn't particularly a requirement to be efficient, because data request wasn't high, and we needed a lot of additional development too such as an Interval Translator because it wasn't sure if the API wouldn't be extended to support other intervals than days, weeks, and months. Nowadays, the customers requirements changed completely, and so instead of daily and monthly intervals, we rather need very short intervals, even in minutes. Long-term-data isn't a requirement anymore, the intervals themselves never changed and so the whole programming process as we did it at the time when using yahoofinance was - from todays point of view - mediocre, to say the least. The API had a huge overhead out of too many hierarchical layers and also many foreign refernences to libraries we might use in one or two occasions, only because no one wanted to write the code itself. You see this in a lot of cases as well. Truly, such a behavior isn't very well thought-out, but the requirement was, that they needed an API like that very fast, so no time to think about efficiency. I am currently cleaning up this project and threw out half of the classes and references, but put a bit more (maybe less than one third) in the classes, with the result that the API itself is finding data almost twice as fast and the compilation process is one third of the time than before. Also the Java version changed to 19 now, which took a lot of time too to debug and fix old code. So from today's point of view, we wrote utter garbage years ago, but it was sufficient enough to work for the customer and that is what mostly counts. But who says that in a few years, another programmer reviews my current written code and also says that's utter garbage too?

be more specific

Thank you Alex! I agree, this is what a 'proper' setup looks like. In a lot of cases, you're the BA/QA/PM as well as Dev :)

Thank you so much! For a little while I did work in a customer facing role, and I do agree it was quite a shift in perspective from working with an IDE all day. Agency work is quite interesting as well, as you are always moving to something different, never fixed. For my first Engineering internship I had to use BitBucket, and I made it an oath to always ask what version control/pipeline system the company uses in interviews :)

@@bigboxSWE I'm curious what your detailed opinion of Bitbucket is because I use it at work now?

:)

Thank you so much! I will be making a few more videos and will definitely keep your feedback at heart. Thank you for the lovely comment :)

WHATT HOW SO LITTLE

He got 2 vids give him time

​@@itaypooO when I wrote the comment he had 54 Subs.

@@thelittleerik4806 damn. @bigboxSWE remember us when ur famous

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. I will be posting more videos that are more aligned with the reality of SWE!

Thank you Saran for your wonderful comment :)

haha! i've worked at those companies too, i've also worked at companies where there are no tickets, no documentation, and you're told to clone a private repo and login through someone else's account to not overdo the number of people in a private repo LOL. tech is the WILD west

@@bigboxSWE what a nightmare hahaha, yeah there are crazy places out there. Luckily we get paid well enough to deal with that.

*The company you work for, not your company. Remember that always.

Thank you so much! It was my first time doing any sort of video editing and audio recording so I emulated my style from Fireship (please search him as well on RU-vid, he has some awesome content).

@@bigboxSWE You're most welcome!😁I also watch Fireship. He makes really good content too.

@@bigboxSWE You’ve gained a sub 😂. I love Jeff’s style. Awesome content here too 👍🏽

Thank you! A lot more time goes into picking them than you may know :)

Thank you so much for the lovely comment. If you maintain a regular exercise, eat well, and pay attention to ergonomics, Software Development is an amazing career choice :)

@@bigboxSWE do you think that you can find a completely remote job as a swe ? Idk much about the field but I want to get into it and to work remotely ( from another country )

​@@abdallasaeed2480 you can, but if you wanna rise, you gotta show yourself. it also highly depends on the team, if they allow it. agile practises speak against it, but corona forced change. to work from another country might be difficult for small to medium sized companies, so if you dont put a lot on the table, the chances are slim.

​@@abdallasaeed2480 most of the dev jobs now are remote.

GPT-5 and above will replace your job

Thank you so much Noah. It seems as though my many months of watching Kitchen Nightmares has finally come in handy!

Thank you so much Huzaifa! I hope you gained a more realistic perspective of the industry!

Thank you so much! I will make a few more videos in the future following a similar style :)

That sounds like the dream! I remember working at a startup a few years ago where the environment was just like that. It was amazing just being able to sink away into the code without having to check my calendar for another needless meeting.

@@bigboxSWE How is working everyday 7 hours (which is more than a regular 9 to 5 job / 5x2) a dream job?

@@Rekon-se6wv Hi rekon, I think you're missing the calculations a bit from Saif Ul Islam, he meant he works 7 hours per day programming and the rest on a break/meetings, which is an extremely ideal scenario for programmers, no distractions with meetings :)

​@@Rekon-se6wv as a swe you have to get shit done There's no such thing as working 2 hrs

@@bigboxSWE still 49 hours a week (more than an average wageslave job), plus the timewasting meetings Its over for NEETbros

Why would new employees reach out to you? Didn't you document your code?

Thank you so much! Did you like the format? I was thinking of moving to a slower slideshow based format but the response of this makes it seems like I'm better off doing it this way. Btw the format idea isn't original. I got it from Fireship, check him out on RU-vid! He's awesome.

It’s not the work. It’s how the work is managed by OTHERS that grinds my gears.

Very important and overlooked aspect of the job people forget to discuss!

i hate micro manage af. xd it is over exhausting

Thank you so much! After seeing the guts of a few companies I began to notice a pattern, and it definitely isn't buffet lunches and 4 coffee breaks per hour.

Thank you!

Glad it was helpful! :)

Thank you so much! I will be making a more focused video on the day-to-day of a dev, and what a workday looks like :)

10/10 🌟

Thank you Jeremy :) The Gordon Ramsay QA bit was very spontaneous! I couldn't find a proper QA clip so I figured, "who's a real life QA?"

that QA who will never let 1 pixel misplaced to pass. that will be the greatest nightmare. and we have one in our team 😰