To students reaching out to me for career advice

Ever since joining my current workplace, I’ve had a number of college students and recent grads reaching out to me for a quick chat. Each conversation has a similar flow: they introduce themselves to me, and I talk about my professional journey. Then I’m asked to give them some career advice, so I share my thoughts and suggestions. After a number of conversations like this, I’ve found myself repeating the same talking points. Then it dawned on me: I should write them down so I can share them more easily.

My “advice” is, of course, largely based on my own career trajectory thus far. So maybe it’s useful to first share a quick summary. That’s where the most conversations start anyways.

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I don’t have a CS degree. My bachelor’s degree is in sociology and anthropology. At college, I mostly read social theories along with taking a few courses on economics, math, and philosophy. Then I got into an one-year master’s program in social sciences and took courses mostly in quantitative research methods and statistics. This is where first learned the basics of computer programming—in R and Python—although the goal was mostly to wrangle some data and plot or fit statistical model to it.

My first real job out of school was at a small government agency as a research analyst. There I got interested in web development after creating a couple of R Shiny dashboard apps. Creating something that has users felt more impactful then writing reports on some data analysis with few readers. With an approval from my accommodating and supportive manager, I could work on an unconventional project for a research analyst—designing and building a web-based solution to streamline the research unit’s publication process (“My first major project has shipped”).

That experience allowed me to switch jobs to join a small team of engineers at a non-profit university lab—as a frontend web developer (“My first month as a developer by title”). After two years of building apps for clinical researchers and clinicians there, I started looking for opportunities to join a larger engineering organization and eventually made another switch to my current job at Spotify (“From building to engineering software”). I should note that this was during the second half of 2022, the tail end of the latest tech hiring craze. COVID was still very much a thing and so was ZIRP.

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My own career trajectory and the observations I’ve made along the way gave me a certain perspective on how to approach career in tech and software engineering. Here are some talking points I find myself repeating in almost all conversations I have with students and recent grads reaching out to me:

• It’s okay if you don’t find software engineering inherently exciting. It’s (still) a fairly lucrative and well-regarded field so the extrinsic motivation of monetary reward and social prestige may be sufficient to keep you going. But understand that you’ll be competing with many who happily spend their leisure hours programming for fun. (And to be fair, this isn’t even unique to software engineering.)

• You don’t need to know or be good at everything to get a job. Read job descriptions out there—they’re often looking for engineers to work on specific technical domains (backend, web, mobile, and so on). So feel free to focus on a specific technical domain that you find interesting. Then apply for positions that best match it. Once you get in and fully onboarded, consider reaching beyond your core technical domain. It can help with shipping features and collaborating with other engineers.

• Companies hiring for roles look for experiences that match the roles. In rare cases, they might be going after specific individuals but recent grads are never that. So it’s often better to start working at a place that hires even if that’s not your dream company. You may continue applying for roles at the dream company, but don’t blindly deny other opportunities.¹ Real world work experience counts, so start working to build that experience and leverage it to get your next role. It’s a valid strategy!

• No, “AI” is not going to replace software engineers. Not directly. Not anytime soon. However, in the short term, companies may opt for providing seasoned engineers with new “AI-powered” tools to increase their productivity rather than hiring new engineers with little experience. Whether this turns out to be true or not, I feel justified to repeat that you’ll benefit from being open to all opportunities so you can start building real world work experience early on.

• If you’re building side projects, know that those projects probably won’t get you a job. But you can use them to tell stories on how you make technical decisions, document those decisions, track progress, measure success, collaborate, prioritize… In other words, what software engineers do at work.

• In a similar vein, consider building an online presence—like a blog or a YouTube channel to share what you learn and build. Your blog or YouTube channel doesn’t even need to be successful. It will still help you to develop relevant skills because so much of software engineering is communication. It can also serve as an effective illustration of who you are as a(n aspiring) software engineer. And who knows? It might lead to opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise!

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I must add that, all things considered, I don’t have a particularly impressive career—especially for my age. Not only I got into software engineering rather late, but I also finished college a few years later than most (mandatory military service, etc.). So when I look around, I find peers who are years younger than I yet years ahead of me in both careers and experience.

But few people come out of school, immediately score a job paying north of $150K a year, and reach $1M in net worth before thirty. And even though I sometimes can’t help feeling insecure next to more accomplished peers, I recognize how fortunate I am. I enjoy my work, live comfortably enough, and even have people reaching out to me for career advice! I really could have been in a wildly different place—did I mention that I majored in anthropology? I loved it, but an anthropology degree isn’t really known for great job prospects.

All in all, I am truly grateful that I found software engineering. I hope that the talking points born out of my own career may offer something relatable and practical to a broader range of people who consider software engineering as a career.

Footnotes

1. As I said, my first job as a developer was at a non-profit university lab. Also, I was once approached by a recruiter with a web developer position at Ulta Beauty. They needed someone to work on their portal site for booking appointments! ↩