Nice post. One suggestion for an area of specialization: web development. Building front-ends and back-ends for websites seems like one of the areas of software engineering with the hottest hiring market and easiest bar for entry. Many coding bootcamps focus on teaching web development skills during a 12 week course, and then immediately recommend applicants apply for a job. If you can build a nice looking full-stack webapp with an API connection to a backend database that’s hosted on e.g. Heroku and has the full code visible on GitHub, you have a good chance of being hired as a web developer. From there, you can branch into many other fields of software engineering.
I agree with everything you said about web/fullstack development (upvoted!),
I’d just like to push back on “hottest hiring market” as an important consideration. I know this may be controversial, hear me out:
It is pretty hard to pick an area of software engineering today where it will be hard to find a job. Picking a slightly hotter area won’t make much difference. (And worse: It’s a question of supply and demand. Fullstack devs are also relatively common). Anyway, my point is that I think this consideration is over rated, and more importantly, distracts some people from something else:
What’s underrated in my opinion? (Within EA)
Personal fit within software development.
This is worthy of an entire post, I think.
TL;DR:
My usefulness as a developer is very much effected by my skill.
The speed I build skill is very much effected by how much my job interests me.
(Please remember this is only a TL;DR)
My disclaimer would be “if you think you’re going to chose a subdomain of software where there is too little demand, feel free to ask about it”.
For example, I wouldn’t recommend learning Pascal.
But in practice from the actual conversations I had with EA devs, none of them aimed in a direction I thought was bad.
Still, fullstack is great, has market demand, has EA demand, and in my personal opinion is very fun as well
Nice post. One suggestion for an area of specialization: web development. Building front-ends and back-ends for websites seems like one of the areas of software engineering with the hottest hiring market and easiest bar for entry. Many coding bootcamps focus on teaching web development skills during a 12 week course, and then immediately recommend applicants apply for a job. If you can build a nice looking full-stack webapp with an API connection to a backend database that’s hosted on e.g. Heroku and has the full code visible on GitHub, you have a good chance of being hired as a web developer. From there, you can branch into many other fields of software engineering.
I agree with everything you said about web/fullstack development (upvoted!), I’d just like to push back on “hottest hiring market” as an important consideration. I know this may be controversial, hear me out: It is pretty hard to pick an area of software engineering today where it will be hard to find a job. Picking a slightly hotter area won’t make much difference. (And worse: It’s a question of supply and demand. Fullstack devs are also relatively common). Anyway, my point is that I think this consideration is over rated, and more importantly, distracts some people from something else:
What’s underrated in my opinion? (Within EA) Personal fit within software development.
This is worthy of an entire post, I think. TL;DR:
My usefulness as a developer is very much effected by my skill.
The speed I build skill is very much effected by how much my job interests me.
(Please remember this is only a TL;DR)
My disclaimer would be “if you think you’re going to chose a subdomain of software where there is too little demand, feel free to ask about it”. For example, I wouldn’t recommend learning Pascal. But in practice from the actual conversations I had with EA devs, none of them aimed in a direction I thought was bad.
Still, fullstack is great, has market demand, has EA demand, and in my personal opinion is very fun as well