Overview of the Top Available Career Paths for Software Engineers With Advice on How to Navigate it

Ex-Google Tech Lead walks you through the career paths for software engineers and computer science majors. Join me at for daily coding interview practice. http://dailyinterviewpro.com And to really fast track your career, join me at for interview training with Live sessions. Intentionally navigating your career path is essential for programmers. Learn your options and position yourself. 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I may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links. #techlead Video Transcript: Note: This transcript is auto-generated by YouTube and may not be completely accurate. 00:00 hey Tech later and welcome back to 00:01 another episode of the tech lead it is 00:03 tea time with your host the tech lead 00:05 the tech lead now as an ex-googler at 00:09 lead I wanted to talk to you about the 00:11 potential career paths that you can be 00:13 taking as a software engineer you know 00:15 I've seen some people going around 00:16 learning machine learning and JavaScript 00:19 and just so you know that's just a 00:20 combination that is unheard of in tech 00:22 there is no role for something like that 00:24 you generally aren't running machine 00:26 learning in JavaScript on client-side 00:28 web browsers so I would encourage you 00:31 that if you really want to fast track 00:33 your career that you sign up for my 00:34 program daily interview procom so then 00:37 the interview Pro is a website in which 00:40 I will send you a free whiteboard an 00:42 interview question every day check it 00:43 out daily interview procom so what we're 00:46 going to do here today is we're going to 00:47 cover some of the top career paths and 00:50 also go over why some of these may not 00:52 actually be good choices for you some of 00:54 these are really only for senior people 00:56 and you need to start building your base 00:57 off of something simpler for entry-level 00:59 people there are certain career paths 01:02 that are far simpler to get into than 01:04 others you know if we take a look at the 01:06 beginning when you start off most 01:08 computer science students and even if 01:10 you didn't go through a computer science 01:11 school a lot of people start off 01:12 learning say Java or C C++ and this gets 01:16 you a standard role as a back-end web 01:18 engineer say another problem is if all 01:20 you know is Java or C then that really 01:22 limits the scope of work that you can do 01:24 and you'll be competing with everybody 01:26 for a few Java based on webpack and 01:29 engineer roles the fact is that most 01:31 companies are not running their backends 01:33 in Java these days a lot of companies 01:35 may be running Python or PHP on their 01:37 backends you know we're talking about 01:38 YouTube Instagram Pinterest uber and 01:41 more so that's our first role here web 01:43 back in engineer and this one of the 01:45 most common types and there's a pretty 01:47 good decent road to get started in it's 01:49 very traditional and so what you really 01:51 want to do here is pick up some common 01:52 languages like say Python or PHP maybe 01:55 pick up node.js and if you know Java or 01:58 C than all the better that's just going 01:59 to make you a stronger candidate and 02:01 more fleshed out and what you want to be 02:03 focusing in on here are web projects the 02:05 REST API contract between client and 02:08 server and what that API looks like what 02:10 the inputs and outputs are are you using 02:13 protocol buffers if you're looking to be 02:15 a an engineer and then you 02:17 certainly start mixing in a little bit 02:18 of graphics development game development 02:21 that's just going to end up kind of 02:22 wasting your time you know all learning 02:24 is good is great but it's not really as 02:26 focused and going to land your job as 02:29 quickly as if you had just really 02:31 focused in on that in 02:32 engineering role now the other type of 02:34 role we have here the second one is web 02:37 front-end engineer and this is an 02:39 especially easy entry point I think if 02:42 you're just looking to land a job in 02:44 tech you pick up a web front-end 02:46 technologies we're talking about 02:48 JavaScript CSS HTML learn some new 02:51 frameworks like say angular react view 02:54 Jas and these are going to get you set 02:56 up to be a web front-end engineer and 02:58 that's really all you need you don't 02:59 really need to touch the backend code 03:00 which generally requires a little bit 03:02 more Theory on the computer science side 03:04 if you take a look at many boot camps 03:06 out there that are aimed at people who 03:08 have no programming experience you may 03:10 notice that a lot of them they kind of 03:11 train you towards being a front-end 03:13 engineer and maybe they give you a 03:15 little bit a full-stack experience as 03:16 well so you can get prepared for that 03:17 but I've seen plenty of roles and 03:19 companies startups where people really 03:22 want is somebody working on the front 03:24 end building up those user experiences 03:26 buttons UI color fonts graphics 03:28 positioning layout hooking up api's onto 03:31 the back end but the front end usually 03:33 does not do much more than simple 03:35 rendering and if all you did was know 03:37 JavaScript very well then I think that 03:40 this could be an excellent entry point 03:41 for you to start getting your foot into 03:43 the door in tech now if you were to 03:46 actually combine say some of the 03:47 back-end and front-end and learn both of 03:49 these then you would be considered a web 03:51 full stack engineer which is excellent 03:53 for a long time I have been a web full 03:55 stack engineer and then the way I still 03:57 amp 03:57 the reason full stack engineer is so 04:00 good is because web is here to stay and 04:02 especially as mobile phones have been 04:04 getting more powerful a lot of companies 04:06 they don't really see the need to create 04:08 native applications they just create a 04:09 very good responsive website and that's 04:12 really all they need and it is also 04:14 perhaps the most entrepreneurial form 04:16 right if you are able to develop an 04:18 entire website back-end through front 04:20 end that you're able to pretty much 04:21 launch your own companies so this is one 04:24 big appeal for me 04:25 I didn't really want to be just a pure 04:27 back an engineer writing a bunch of 04:29 Python scripts because that would not be 04:31 sufficient for me to be entrepreneurial 04:33 in that sense so I think that the web 04:35 full-stack engineer is an excellent goal 04:37 for many people and it's a road that is 04:40 in high demand by many startups people 04:42 who just want you to do kind of a little 04:44 of everything put a whole feature 04:45 together front end through back ends 04:47 start to finish and for this sort of 04:49 role you're going to want some of that 04:51 front-end experience like JavaScript CSS 04:53 HTML maybe angular or react and that on 04:56 the back end you're going to want to 04:57 know maybe like Python PHP Ruby on Rails 05:00 Django Java nodejs golang some backhand 05:04 language like that and if you know some 05:06 databases like my sequel and then some 05:08 Linux to just glue everything together 05:10 then that's really going to get you all 05:12 set up there and so that brings us to 05:14 our fourth category here which is mobile 05:16 engineering it turns out that mobile 05:19 engineers are one of the biggest 05:21 categories of Engineers which may come 05:23 as a surprise to some people Mobile is 05:25 big and it has surpassed desktop usage 05:28 many software engineers including myself 05:30 have built their entire careers on being 05:32 a mobile engineer iOS or Android those 05:35 are the two big ones and you can pick 05:36 one to specialize in this is also an 05:38 excellent entry point by the way if 05:40 you're trying to get into tech if all 05:43 you knew was iOS engineering and you 05:46 decided to get good at that or Android 05:48 engineering then that's pretty much all 05:50 you need for a roll you don't need 05:52 JavaScript you don't need databases or 05:54 Python all you need is to know how to 05:55 build an Android app using say 05:57 Coughlin's or Java or for iOS it would 05:59 be swift or objective-c 06:01 so this is a very clean and easy path 06:03 right because all you have to do is just 06:05 learn one single language and you're set 06:08 and the other great thing about this is 06:10 that it can actually help you be 06:12 somewhat entrepreneurial as well right 06:14 it's pretty fun to be able to put 06:15 together an entire app front through 06:17 back launch it and you can have some 06:20 results there too you could put together 06:21 a game and try your luck at the App 06:24 Store maybe it will become popular maybe 06:26 you can build a useful service or 06:28 something like Twitter and that could be 06:30 quite useful as well if you were to mix 06:32 some of that client-side code experience 06:34 with a little bit of the backend code 06:35 back in the day 06:37 to be that iOS was the far better 06:39 platform but these days 06:40 Android is big in fact Android has 06:43 surpassed iOS a long time ago you know 06:45 the number of Android users is probably 06:47 four to one or five to one maybe more 06:50 than that by now Android has been 06:52 growing very quickly and even though iOS 06:54 is very popular in the United States 06:56 Android is by far the biggest global 06:58 market share 06:59 now another career path here that we've 07:00 talked about somewhere is game 07:02 development or graphics development and 07:04 this was something that I had been doing 07:05 straight out of college and a lot of 07:08 people I would say tried to get into 07:10 game development because that's really 07:11 the first interaction people have with 07:13 computers maybe they play a computer 07:15 game when they're a kid I played one and 07:17 then I was inspired by that and I wanted 07:19 to make my own games and really get into 07:21 graphics because it's so visual but the 07:23 funny thing is that you know Fame 07:24 companies they don't build games and the 07:27 game industry if you were to get into it 07:28 it's pretty notorious for low pay and 07:30 hard working conditions and they just 07:32 don't treat you with the same level of 07:34 respect as top tier tech companies in 07:36 Silicon Valley that's why it's a little 07:38 unfortunate that companies like Google 07:39 aren't making games they're not in that 07:41 game business if they were I think game 07:43 development would be an excellent field 07:45 to get into it's so fun you and they're 07:47 often working in C++ under type 07:49 performance limitations memory 07:51 requirements and performance 07:53 requirements they have to stay at 60 07:55 frames per second and then the graphics 07:56 programming portion as well often 07:58 requires a lot of knowledge about 07:59 physics shaders GPUs a whole set of 08:02 skills over there luckily because of 08:04 virtual reality and augmented reality 08:06 starting to gain traction graphics 08:09 engineering is actually becoming a 08:11 viable field here you know it used to be 08:13 that you could only do graphics 08:14 engineering if you were building like a 08:16 game engine and that was pretty much 08:17 about it but now you know you could be 08:20 working as a Google under VR or AR next 08:22 year and hardware or maybe simply on 08:24 some camera app or on creating YouTube 08:26 video filters now another area that we 08:29 haven't talked so much about and I don't 08:30 hear that much about but it turns out is 08:32 pretty popular is data engineering now 08:36 what I did here was I went to H and 08:38 hiring me and you can do this too this 08:40 is a list of job postings from hacker 08:42 news they just scraped the whole website 08:44 and then form 08:45 nicely for you and you can see that if I 08:47 were to look up data engineer there's at 08:50 least eighty matches for this and so 08:52 that's pretty much a lot of people are 08:54 looking for data engineers here data 08:56 engineering is really about organizing 08:58 data you may have tons of data logging 09:00 coming in and then you need to build 09:02 data pipelines in which you write 09:05 scripts and say Python or something like 09:07 that and you consume a bunch of data you 09:09 write sequel queries and then you output 09:11 that into a nice pretty table that is 09:14 fast query and then like a day the 09:16 scientists make worry that and just 09:18 present some data in a nice way so 09:20 that's data engineering and then there's 09:22 a whole bunch of other specialty fields 09:23 one of which is machine learning which 09:25 seems to be all the rage now it's very 09:27 popular I would encourage you that if 09:29 you are interested in machine learning 09:31 and it is a very popular thing that you 09:33 take a look at some of the job 09:34 requirements out there I don't think 09:36 it's the easiest thing for entry-level 09:38 people to start getting into it requires 09:40 quite a bit of math and experience in 09:42 this area to really be effective at 09:44 machine learning and oftentimes it's 09:46 funny that if I were to ask a new 09:48 college grant what they're interested in 09:49 90% of them will say machine learning 09:52 the thing is we don't need 90% of people 09:54 to be machine learning engineers right 09:56 we need like maybe say 10% to be machine 09:58 learning engineers and then for the rest 10:00 you know building like say some Android 10:02 app iOS app some back-end some front-end 10:05 and that there's really a whole host of 10:07 other interesting engineering types you 10:09 have cybersecurity DevOps 10:11 right that's like site reliability 10:12 engineering and this is one thing to 10:14 think about if you dig yourself into 10:15 Linux and Perl and scripting and bash 10:18 Unix commands that's not quite the same 10:20 thing as software engineering it's 10:22 actually closer to site reliability 10:24 engineering or DevOps so just understand 10:27 that there is a distinction between the 10:28 two they're both fine careers right any 10:31 career is actually fine you can just 10:32 pick whichever one that's exciting for 10:34 you and then there's QA engineer as well 10:37 and that really has to do with the 10:38 writing test automation software and 10:40 coming up with the test Suites to test 10:42 programs and systems front to back 10:44 integration testing unit testing 10:46 automated testing all sorts of stuff 10:49 like that if that's your interest and 10:50 other more power to you as far as that 10:52 goes I know that some people they get 10:54 into QA engineer 10:56 and then they hope that from there 10:57 they'll be able to springboard into 10:59 actual software engineering which is a 11:01 path that I've seen some people do but I 11:04 would just warn you that if you do take 11:06 this route there's a chance that number 11:08 one you could be digging yourself deeper 11:10 into QA engineering and it would 11:12 probably require you to actually be good 11:14 at that job to be able to transfer out 11:16 right like you would have to have enough 11:17 sufficient passion in test automation 11:20 engineering to really be doing that for 11:22 say six months to a year and you may not 11:24 be able to transfer out it may just dig 11:26 you deeper into that area whichever path 11:29 you choose I would recommend that you be 11:31 passionate about the work that you're 11:32 doing not just so that you can be in 11:34 there for like a show amount of time and 11:36 search out because I've heard stories 11:37 about people who get trapped in these 11:39 rows and then they realize that they 11:41 didn't really want to do this from the 11:42 first place and then that's a whole 11:44 other mess yourself so overall I would 11:46 recommend that you think about the 11:47 career path that you're taking and 11:49 position yourself correctly and navigate 11:51 that focus you're learning and yeah I 11:54 mentioned this because this seems to 11:56 happen so many intents I've been 11:58 reviewing a lot of resumes and here's a 11:59 quick plug for tech interview procom 12:02 where X Facebook engineer Joma and I 12:05 ex-google engineer we prepare you for 12:08 the technical interviews and that's part 12:10 of this we've also been reviewing 12:11 resumes so check it out Tech interview 12:13 procom work when the fast track your 12:14 career I've been reviewing resumes and I 12:17 just see some people there all over the 12:19 place they seem to be doing a little bit 12:21 of everything or they maybe have been 12:23 building up a skill in something that 12:24 just doesn't seem very useful you maybe 12:26 they've been learning some thought net 12:28 Java and then a little bit of JavaScript 12:30 and HTML and when I look at that profile 12:33 set it's just not clear what type of 12:35 person this is right what is that 12:36 profile is that a back-end engineer web 12:39 front-end engineer your Java engineer it 12:41 seems like just an engineer generalist 12:43 like just a standard coder but the thing 12:45 is I think that when people say they 12:46 want a generalist engineer what they 12:48 really mean is they're looking for a 12:50 full stack web engineer who understands 12:52 a specific tech stack check out the 12:54 roles that companies are looking for 12:56 even if you're not planning to apply now 12:58 you can take a look and just prepare 13:00 your path and think about the skills 13:01 that you may need to learn and that I 13:03 can just help you focus your learning 13:05 and land a job faster so that though for 13:07 me remember to give 13:08 video alike I really appreciate that 13:10 subscribe and I will see you next time 13:12 thanks bye