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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

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

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