Software developer species
Driven by natural curiosity about people I decided o write an article about all kinds of programmers, coders, engineers known as developers.No matter how good we are, when graduating computer science majors, we all have to start from the bottom of the carrier ladder sooner or later. Some of us do it during the studies, some of us do it after. Obviously every start is different, but it’s highly probable these very first moments have one thing in common, it’s confronting the the reality. Market demands way more beyond what has been taught on universities and each company (usually) has its own technology stack, driven mostly by how this very technology solves problems, which simply means how much time is needed to release the product, which means money.
When entering new environment, baby programmers face many new technologies to solve advanced problems depending on the field i.e. data driven website, analysing data, application architecture. Quite often they realize they need to educate themselves and they start doing so by learning from multiple knowledge sources like books, internet, hackatons, colleagues, documentation (recommended ☺).
It appears that in order to achieve anything, your learning path should be defined and the more specific strategy you have, the better results you can expect when given enough time.
This is part of the developer survey from stackoverflow.com, which tells us more about developer species and the variety of its types.
Many of the roles above are associated with certain technologies and/or languages. This means learning paths and curves are also different.
Of professional developers who studied at the university level, over 60% said they majored in computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering. However, the we can today we can observe an interesting trend, which is mixing multiple fields of study into one. There are new opportunities emerging from these combinations like bioengineering with use of biomedical technologies.
Over 80% of developers use Stack Overflow as their source of new knowledge, which is both understandable and terrifying as many of them ale simply copy-pasting the accepted answers as the solution to their problems.
It’s an interesting result as we’ve heard a lot about languages like Kotlin, Scala or R but they are not major players when looking at this chart. However, this is generally caused by the fact they offer some different approach, which is might be more productive to work with but harder to learn. On the other hand some serve only one purpose and it’s a niche environment i.e. R , which is used for working on and visualizing data.
The last two charts are giving more insight into what kind of people developers are.
Over 40% contribute to open source. Open source is a movement, model and also a kind of a license that applies to the software.
Around 80% code as a hobby.
To sum up, nowadays a developer doesn’t necessarily understand another developer. We have to specify in which direction our career will go and it defines what we learn and what we do.
- Name 3 sources of your knowledge (if you have). Provide other you’ve heard of and wish to try.
- What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
- Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
Comments
2. Struggles of getting up early, and dealing with boring people at work. That should be the top priority at uni - how to manage your mental health at work.
3. Its fine untill you become over-educated (and so underpaid, and living in parents home)
In my normal developing process firstly, I look into language or framework documentation. It is easy to learn if it is well written, but in most cases it's not. When I can't resolve some problem then I search for solution in StackOverflow. If it fails, I browse many random websites on the web.
2. What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
The main struggles for me is often problems with work organisation. Now companies use many agile methodologies but in most cases it does not work.
3. Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
If they fight for their degrees and at the same time get the very most knowledge out of it it is ok. But if they work only for degrees it is useless.
I have faced few problems when I started working, but I don’t think it would be possible to learn how to solve them at university. I was assign to quite big and rather old project, and it had a lot of documentation, applications, permissions and other things. They were scatter in many different places and it was really hard to understand everything properly.
In the case of pursuing degrees, I think it really depends on the job. I we are talking about developers, there are a lot of areas where some official acknowledge of skills is necessary. For example in the field of security. On the other hand, in the most cases, pure skills and experience is much more important.
When working on a program I usually struggle with developing some small but crucial features that require more of experience to make them efficient and simple rather than overall knowledge of technology.
I think that degree puts you on a good path when you start learning programming, but when you get far enough to the point you can teach yourself then it becomes a formality and may feel a little bit useless. Overall, I believe that you should try to get a degree because it will help you to develop self-learning abilities that are very important for you if you want to stay "marketable" and adaptable.
As for many other developers the official documentation is the single source of truth for me but there were a lot of situations when it didn’t help. If I can’t find an answer to my problem I will most likely try to google it and there is a high probability to be forwarded to one of stackoverflow’s topic. Most likely the answer will be there but life is unpredictable and there were situations when the users of stackoverflow didn’t know how to solve that particular problem. If so the extensive web crawling come into play. After exploring from 2 to 4 first google pages I decide to quit and for next couple of hours fixing a bug on my own.
2. What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that haven’t been introduced to you at your university?
The main struggle for me at the beginning was inability to test my software. When a project becomes big enough and there are no tests the probability that your new feature or code refactor will put the whole project on fire grows exponentially.
Also design patterns were not introduced for me in the university but they are heavily used in the product development.
3. Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless?
To my mind, it all depends on the person. I know lots of people who started working after the 2-nd year(or even earlier) and they managed to become part of a team, impacted to the project and so forth.
On the other side there are still quite a lot who simply don’t care about self-education, have limited knowledge in computer science and about to get their diploma.
I learned a lot of additional knowledge not directly tied to coding, but nevertheless required to understand my job as an engineer who designs and creates software products. I think this is what all self-taught programmers are missing. They know how to code, but they don't really understand the underlying structure of programmes. This is probably something they learn over the years, but I don't have that much time. So I'm really happy I took the CS course at the university.
My favorite source of additional knowledge is usually books and documentation. I like reading, but reading about programming doesn't work without doing. So when I read, I also try to practice what I've learned. I also love youtube courses - especially those from other universities. Stanford University or MIT courses are really high quality and about topics, I didn't have a chance to find during my studies at PJATK.
Regarding the real world work, I can't really tell how it will look from programmer's point of view. But I worked quite long in the IT field and I know how much theory differs from practice - so I understand I still will have to learn for years to become a specialist developer. But it's a different kind of learning. Instead of trying to understand the whole field, we will focus on very narrow problems and products and learn to use it in a very specific context. But I'm looking forward to it.
When I started my first work I was shocked about my lack of knowledge. I think I've learned more when working full time for 1.5 year than 4 years at the university. I recommend for everyone to start working as soon as it is possible.
Definintely deploying an application is something that should be thaught at the university. Without knowing how to do that you can't basically exist as a programmer. This was a main struggle for me during my Engineer's Thesis.
I wish I know an answer to this question, but I don't. Some people say that experience and skills are the only things that matter in the IT industry, but some say that diploma can help you in future. I guess that getting bachelor's degree is a must, but master degree is not that important. It depends if you really need it.
Name 3 sources of your knowledge (if you have). Provide other you’ve heard of and wish to try.
Toturials on the internet, mentors in the field of studies, paid courses. Also, I heard about this thing called universities. A lot of people talk about them, should I get interested?
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
EVERY SINGLE TASK. Literally, every single task I got was something completely different from what I learned at my university. I was on my second and third year of studies and not a single time have I used anything that I learned during my studies.
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
Degree nowadays is a piece of paper that a lot of people give more prize that they really should. And in most cases, studies give you inadequate skills compared to the ones you will need during your carrier.
I agree with Rafał’s answer to the second question – literally everything. I joined my current company as a developer 2 months before going to university, so everything I faced at work was either never mentioned or completely omitted during classes.
I think people should start a career in software development during the second year of studies. That way, after graduation, they can apply for a non-junior position, having both scientific degree and prior experience on their CV.
Initially, I had a problem with finding solutions, because the lecturers usually recommended books, where finding a solution was difficult. I did not know StackOverFlow and other helpful sites yet.
It's hard to judge because I know some great programmers without studies who are self-taught and earn a lot. I also know people after graduation who have never worked and have problems with basic things. I think that despite everything, it is worth getting a title before starting a career or at the same time reconciling it. In the absence of a title, it is difficult to break through among competitors on the labor market.
The first source which comes to my mind is self motivation and I am personally an example of it. It does not matter whether you are learning from book or just took some online course, thanks to motivation it is much easier for us to gather this knowledge and remember it for a long time. Another sources I find useful may be online courses and YouTube videos.
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
Except the practical skills itself, I would say the overall process of handling things around in software projects. I mean the typical routines, which occur everyday at work. Obviously, this is why we go to work to get familiar with this whole process , but school could at least prepare its students for it.
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
Well, it depends. I know some guys who don't have any degree, but they are so good at what they are doing. When it comes to software, it does not really matter which university have you graduated, but what skills you have got and how you use them. Nevertheless, it is socially expected to have a degree and it is common that lot of employers may expect one from you, so yes, people should pursue degrees in general.
Google, documentation, speaking with high-level specialists.
2.What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
I don't remember exactly what was the hardest thing i faced at work, but definitely every new project, new technology is a challenger for me and for any person. Bugs fixing is also annoying thing and can took a lot of your time.
3.Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
It is useless, nobody cares about your degree while you are working in IT sphere. It might be stereotype over our contries.
As for the kind of struggles I faced at work which I did not face at university, by far the biggest one is dealing with old, clunky inflexible solutions which have been in use for so long that they cannot be easily changed. As a result, the only fast way to deal with them is to make your own clunky workaround, which works for a time, but is inflexible just like the original source of the problem.
As for pursuing degrees before starting a career, it is not neccessary - experience generally trumps education in the job market, though having a degree is certainly useful, as having some relevant education is far better than having none.
Name 3 sources of your knowledge (if you have). Provide other you’ve heard of and wish to try.
Of course, the main source of knowledge for me today is the Internet. Google plays an important role for me here. It helps just great in moments of work, study and to gain knowledge in other areas.
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
Unfortunately, sometimes it seems that the information is not presented in the right form. Sometimes it is required to study the material further. But in some moments it is missing in electronic form. This causes some difficulty.
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
Here you can say that the diploma itself is not as important as the knowledge and skills that you possess. But, of course, if you have a diploma, it will be good to say that you have a good amount of information.
2.The effective communication with others people involved in the project. You can learn a lot of technical knowledge from professors, but that struggle can make your technical knowledge means almost nothing (probably I'm exaggerating but it's important and we can't learn it at university)
3. I think that it's a good think to starts your career before degree because while working you can realise is it really something that you want to do in your life. And if your answear is "yes" you can explore the subject which helps with deciding about your education.
- Pull Requests, web tutorials and documentation. I should try pluralsight, I've heard it's great but I always preferred to read.
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
- Contact with business people, proper use of scrum - basically working in anything that is not a waterfall project, using design and architectural patterns - for me this one it is extremely outrageous that throughout 4 years of education there is place for so much useless stuff but not enough to teach basics of these two, or ways of implementation (beside MVC and own creations of MAS lecturers).
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
- No it is useless. Most of the information there is already outdated and lecturers are too stuck with one technology. Just go to work and see how bureaucratic and narrow minded polish education system is. No matter from the university
I haven`t faced a lot of problem that I couldn`t solve thanks to the knowledge I got from the university, but still there were some. For example, any university can not give you knowledge about the other disciplines which you may require on your new job or you can rarely find out perfectly implemented standards or methodologies and there is no certain answer on the question "How to deal with problems?" or "How to react in these situations?"
The thing that I think was missing is actual process of developing a project from the beginning to the end.
It’s very often said that without a degree you won’t get a job. Well, not at all. These days many people get a really good job without finishing studies, but in my opinion it’s always better to have paper because it may happen that it will be needed to get i.e. a higher position.
1. My favorite 3 sources of knowledge are Stackoverflow/reddit, publicly available courses on various universities and technical documentation.
2. The first struggle was writing clean code. No one at our university ever thought us how to write proper code. I was fortunate enough to learn this early at my current work.
3. It depends, you’ll never be 100% ready for the job after obtaining a degree. Surely you should have basic technical and theoretical knowledge, but more than that it’s important to know how to learn new things quickly.
Working with other developers and communicate among team- it is something you learn by experience.
Working with clients is usually very hard and tiresome.
It depends on carieer you aim for. As a developer you dont't realy need any studies knowledge is everything you need but of course its better to have any type of degree when looking for job. By finishing school you claim that you have certain skills but unfortunatelly for most people its just a big talk.
Obviously the first one is an official documentation. I've learned a lot from stackoverflow or some java blogs like Baeldung. I read a lot of books and I think that even in 2019 it might be worth to buy a book about programming. I watch a lot of courses on udemy, and I have attended to some conferences.
2. What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
At first it was a big fear, that the project is a lot bigger that any of my university projects I have done. Also I was overhelmed by the fact that some technology is somethig new for me or other guys are familiar with the stuff I haven't even heard of.
3. Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
I think they should start working during ther university. University provides You a very good basics, but if You won't try a real word struggles in a real world projects, Your degree won't be worth too much
In the university where I'm getting my degree as data science, this specialization is very new has limited resources. So most of the information which I learned to get a job in this field I got form the internet.
On the one hand if you want to be a specialist in some area it would be better to get structured knowledge, and learn how to study, how to absorb new information. On the other hand some universities are just a business systems their priority is just to get profit.
Hmm, I think that first struggle was writing quality code because I have never pay attention on that when I was doing university projects. After first code review, I have read special book "Clean Code". Thanks for that, I know good practices and I can write quality code.
To be honest, I needed university to get first job because thanks for my lessons at first semester I have understood that I should work hard because I have only one life and I have to get better everyday. It was very important moment for me.
- I usually check the documentation on GitHub, later I try to find some examples of how we can use this technology/framework etc. The last step is StackOverflow.
2. What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
- Everything related to git. I think that we should introduce this topic to our university because it is used everywhere on a daily basis.
3. Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
- I think that you should combine it. In my opinion, you should go to university and figure out if you like coding if so just try to find a job.
With this approach, you can earn a degree and get experience as a developer.
2. Testing, testing and one more time - testing. I am highly surprised that after few years of studying on our academy nobody showed us how to write tests for our code.
3. I think that it was quite worth it to start studying on PJATK because I have learnt here a lot of interesting things which would be hard to learn on my own. My motivation, hard work and knowledge from studies let me to achieve a lot in commercial work.
I have faced a huge problem when connecting my full-stack app to database. I have no idea why, but connection was fine, I just cannot query anything. Knowledge I had from university wasn’t enough to solve this problem, even after search a lot of tutorials and “solutions” on forums I can’t fixed it.
In my opinion university gives you great basic knowledge and good start. But at work, you will learn everything a way faster, cuz you focus on projects and face real problems. Also there are more experienced people, who can help you if you cannot find a solution by yourself.
Internet (reddit, medium), documentation and books. I am quite impressed that there are books which are being constantly updated, so they're actual.
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
The whole production process of a commercial application. I think that no one shared this knowledge at university, but I think that the reason behind it is simple - in every company it looks different.
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
Honestly I don't know - I've learned so much from internet on my own, but I think that university gave me solid basics. It's 50/50 I think
At the beginnings video tutorial/courses on YouTune or for example udemy is very handy. Later when you have some basics the best source is official documentation and of course stackoverflow and similar. Sometimes when I wold like to learn some more advanced techniques connected with code architecture and design patterns I prefer books/e-books.
2. What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that hasn’t been introduced to you at your university?
Working on big legacy projects, writting tests, using design patterns. How to communicate with bussines peaople and connected with this topic techniques like event storming. Working with different approaches to software development like DDD, BDD, TDD, microservices and so on.
3.Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
I know many people(also I) who started working during studies and I think it is good to gain professional experience. Studies give basics and shows different paths. Diploma is not enough to achieve professional success.
2. Working as a mobile developer I didn’t get enough knowledge in the university so I should learn it by myself.
3. Nowadays it doesn’t matter. Even at work I have many of people who don’t have degrees.
- When I'm working on something I don't know what's the idea or the benefits of this project, and I really struggle when I'm just trying to find solutions just to submit a project, Then what's the next project to searching solutions!.
- I think in general any student should trying many careers to determine which
"My Career", at least will earn knowledge and these experiences will show what will appropriate, next to a university degree.
Top 3 are: researchgate, kaggle, and maybe medium. Why? A lot of data science researches, fresh ideas and just interesting stuff to read. The official documentation is a good source too and of course the stackoverflow’s topic, but it’s mostly for coding purposes and my work mostly depends on researching and creating new algorithms.
What kind of struggles have you faced at work or own projects that haven’t been introduced to you at your university?
Academy gave me a good start knowledge. Mostly struggles which I faced at work was connected with my profession - Data Science, so I can’t judge academy because of that.
Should people >>generally<< pursue degrees before starting a career or is it useless? Elaborate.
It depends on the profession they choose. In IT world I strongly recommend starting a career as soon as possible. Because based on my own experience and the experience of my friend you learning the information and technologies 3-4 times faster. But it also depends on the university you are studying in.
-How to get a good job, how to talk about money and how to talk with other people? I guess these are still big chunks of our lifes that you could also learn at uni.
-This is really hard question, i don't think there is just one answer. For most situations it doesn't matter, if you are looking to work in some huge multinational company then you might need just a diploma to show it. In most situations, your knowledge is all you need as nobody cares how you learned it.
The second one - the one and only StackOverlow.
The third one - some courses on platforms like Udemy etc.
2. How to optimise code as its best and what Continuous Integration is overall when talking about struggles at work.
3. I know a lot of people without any degree and they are amazing devs. It just depends. University can get you some overall knowledge, but you have to push it fowards by yourself. Nowdays it's not necessarily needed. If I were given a chance to decide again, I wouldn't go to university.
2. Newsletters – I'm subscribing many different newsletters and try to read as many articles I can.
3. Conferences & Workshops – I'm a lucky person because my company covers 50% of the cost of any conference or workshop I'm attending. It's a really good source of knowledge, especially workshops when you actually do something.
Well, in my opinion, the role of the university is not to prepare us to know the solution for the problem, but to teach us a few different kinds of science so that we can guess where the problem is. At work, I do entirely different things that I learn at the university. I'm in the last semester, and I asked myself and some of my friends in the previous week, what we have learned at this university that was useful at work? And I pointer only 3 subjects... Why? Because we learn mostly about outdated technologies or practices. That's why when I'm interviewing somebody I treat university only as a curiosity. It can give us some fundamentals, but it won't prepare us for anything more than an intern.
I think it's completely useless. I have +3,5 years of commercial experience. How could it be that many? I started when I was on the 2 months on studies. It was tough, I was working for 12/16 hours a day, but now I can see many benefits of that. The only positives of university I see are:
– we do have a paper which might be useful in some companies (mostly large corporations, so it depends on your goals)
– it gives additional points to multiple visas (that's why I'm pushing myself, I want to move abroad, and I need a paper just to obtain a visa, but I'm sure that my employer wont value it that much when I would have 4+ years of experience)
– for some people, it's a need when they don't have enough of self-motivation and need some "whip" over them which pushes them forward