Not every company does sprints, pair programming, or has experienced programmers on the team. Pick the company and role very carefully and watch out for red flags
This might sound elitist but if a company is ready to lock you in fast, chances are they didn't vet their staff and overall your experience (as a junior/intern) will suffer.
This is actually a pretty good video. I've been a SWE for 5 years now and this video paints quite a realistic image of what a day in the life looks like for me. Way to go champ.
@@bigboxSWE I agree that a lot of content does not accurately represent software engineering. Software engineering itself requires applying engineering principles to proof your software will work. (As opposed to proving written code functions as expected) There's a lot of people who call themselves software engineers but are instead, senior level developers. Still a note-worthy profession, but definitely not the same. Some people believe they're the same. Though I haven't met a developer yet who can produce engineering level quality products unless they spend 3x (wet finger estimation) the resources. What are your thoughts on that?
@@sneer0101 why is it bizarre for you? Through job applications and degrees, it's very clear there's a difference between programmers and engineers. This video describes a programmer's common day, not that of an engineer. I'm particularily weirded out by the fact that the core component of engineering is not mentioned; how the engineering principles are applied and when. That's the most important aspect doing engineering; applying engineering principles.
I've been a dev for 9 years now... 90% of your time will be spent figuring out how someone else wrote a system and the other 10% will be spent fixing their bugs.
Thank you for providing an actually accurate representation of what it's like. An important bit to highlight is that when you're starting out it'll take a long while to get your bearings on things. Like when I first started my first ticket (which I didn't even start untill about another week in) took me around a week and a half and my PR for it literally changed one line of code. Especially if it's your first time working in a big codebase it's pretty overwhelming to understand everything that's going on, but eventually it gets easier (especially in healthy comps that have a culture of collaboration and pair programming)
Thank you so much for your wonderful comment. Your first 4-5 months as a Jr Developer is absolutely brutal. I had around 1 year of intern experience going into my first full-time gig, and even that didn't help as much. My first merge request (we used GitLab) took me 2 months, and it was adding a csv parser in an import functionality in our java monolith (even with pair programming and a lot of help from senior devs!)
My company doesn’t allow pair programming. If you ask too many questions of your supervisor, it’s brought up negatively in performance reviews. We also don’t have Jira or Git. We use “SourceSafe” and some old Microsoft equivalent of Jira with no story points or way of quantifying anything. I hate my job.
These types of videos tend to either really sugar coat the job or really make it sound terrible. I'm glad to finally see a video that splits the difference and shows how, like any job, it has it's ups and downs. It also largely depends on the organization you work for. I see so many people talk about 60 hour weeks and burnout when most of my jobs have been the opposite to the point where I'm bored. As a general rule, the people making the most noise are also the most unhappy. It all comes down to where you work and your management. If you're a consultant, it comes down to the culture at your firm and the culture of your client.
@@puch9830 it does, but a hundred times as many people claim to be full stack as actually are full stack. Which is weird - it's not like full stack means you're "better".
I worked as a Software Engineer for a number of years for a very large corporation. At maximum 20% of the time would be spent on coding. Many of the items you mention were practiced there too. With more focus on design up front and directing changes to focus on measurable business results. Lots of things never ever get visited, because they don't really benefit the customer or the business.
What you're describing is 100% of where most of the industry is headed, (bar unicorns and Big-Tech) most companies treat Software Development like their IT department (e.g as a cost centre) even some B2B SaaS orgs I've worked at view it the same. It's quite dreadful and leads to a net negative for everyone.
I'm literally just about to start writing some mocks I started on last night, but could not get to because of stand-up, followed by a emergency call, followed by a planning meeting with my whole agile team, even though I have another meeting with my 'HR manager' in about an hour. I'm just trying to get out of the mindset that actually writing code is the most important thing.
@@kishirisu1268Big tech fired 75% of their staff because they focused far too much on growth rather than profit. Most big tech ran on VC and other investor money sources. When the fed hiked interest rates up, investors started demanding to see ROI or else they'd stop funneling money down the sinkholes these companies were. So the job cuts were first up, except with growth happening far too fast there were way too many teams involved (too many cooks). The result is these companies shedding employees and then shedding features, becoming full of bugs because the product was built with the intention of having way more people maintaining it. Industry grew way too fast and you're gonna see it happen again with AI
Did someone tell you at some point that being compensated monetarily for your labor is supposed to be “fun”? The vast majority of human beings do not enjoy their day to day tasking because the vast majority of things that need to be done aren’t “fun”. If you spend your life pursuing “fun” at work you will probably spend your whole life in pursuit
@@Serusshi so every janitor scrap metal collector and rape detective "should be" having a great time were it not for the "man" XD yeah nah bruh once you graduate come see me about "fun". Thats fugazi shit. Yuore allowed 18ish years of fun then 52 years of fun weekends if ur lucky. make the most of em
that's because you can't have good software written by a bunch of monkeys pooping out code with no coordination. If you actually worked as a software dev you would appreciate most of the things mentioned because they help you and others. Nobody is an omnibus that can look at a 1000 file codebase and know everything about it, documentation is needed, meetings are needed to help you progress because you WILL get stuck
To be fair, this is actually the _ideal_ software developer experience. It can be much better or worse. An example of "worse" is if you have "QA driven design" where qa "bugs" are QA telling the devs how to make the program work, or having code that is nested 15 levels deep in an unreadable blob of garbage logic that you can't change without breaking 6 other things. Usually problems like that can be resolved if the team pushes to do things the right way though!
Yep, been there and done that! I'm actually at an org with a very competent QA team, so when they do find something they usually work with the PM to see if the bug is 'worth it'.
This is pretty much 100% accurate. I'm really fortunate to be working at a company whose management style maximizes dev time as much as possible and is generally pretty understanding of dev time/application needs.
I just finished a NASA internship this May after getting my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. And I can say this is 95% what my days was like. Also, thankful to have worked with a wonderful and supportive team for my learning and development.
You nailed it. I find it depends on the team and developer for pair programming. My current position has no pair programming because all of the experienced developers keep to themselves.
Yes that is quite true as well! This video was geared towards more Junior Developers, I noticed in teams where everyone had over >3 years of experience pair programming was nonexistent, and if you did have issues you can pretty reasonably solve it over Slack or GitLab/GitHub comments.
We need more content like this. So tired of the youtuber dev mindset people are trying to use as the status quo. The guy who is very prescriptive pm every little topic and change their tooling and stack every week. Simply does not exist in most day to day work as a developer, but I don't know why people use the former as a reference...
This was very accurate and funny. Most of the lingo and way of working feels complicated at start, but then you realize it's just some simple steps you need to follow at the end of the day.
I would have to make a separate video on your first 1 month as a Junior Developer, it can be so brutal! Thank you so much for your lovely comment. :) I hope I brought some value to your YouTubing sesh
Extremely accurate in my experience. Add some random Slack notifications here and there, about half are directed to you and the other half people using @here Also depending on the company a ton of logging to vpns or asking for permissions, signing in... (all security related)
Nicely explained. This is what a well organized workflow looks like. In my 15 years career spread across more than a dozen teams - I worked like that maybe like in 3 of them. Others were fifty shades of chaos.
Moving from a Junior developer job where I was tasked to do the grunt coding to then starting to have to have client meetings is definitely a work shift for me I have to face at the moment. But then again working in agency where your time can be billable to a client in comparison to a product is quite different. Brilliant video, really clearly laid out. Totally agree with the Bitbucket sentiment. 😂
Thank you so much! For a little while I did work in a customer facing role, and I do agree it was quite a shift in perspective from working with an IDE all day. Agency work is quite interesting as well, as you are always moving to something different, never fixed. For my first Engineering internship I had to use BitBucket, and I made it an oath to always ask what version control/pipeline system the company uses in interviews :)
I find this very useful, as someone who's getting into this world, watching a clear and concise video of the things I will be doing in a work environment makes me realize the things I have to improve beyond coding.
1.Get a job in software that pays the bills, live within your means and save up some money consistently. 2. Don't overwork yourself, switching jobs every 1-2 years is ASTRONOMICALLY more money than fighting for a promotion. 2.1 If you feel overworked, start looking, someone else will pay more. Don't be afraid of new environments or relearning, you do that on the job daily anyway. 3. Start working on side projects (if company doesn't allow side projects see 2.1)
This is pretty accurate for where I work. Definitely plenty of customer support tickets, estimation is usually done by more senior devs or tech leads. Stand up is every morning, showcase, retro, and planning are once a month, I think. We also have fortnightly catch-ups with our team leads, or managers. We're also doing some squad experimentation, if there is a big blocker we have breakout rooms to discuss this issue and can attend that to either help out or learn something. This is to prevent soaking up standup time with issue related rabbit holes.
As a student in college for Software Development my biggest fear is getting a job and not knowing wtf I'm doing and getting fired, like what if my code just sucks, or I fumble 🙃. Hopefully someone can calm my fears and anxiety
As a junior your code will suck, you will fumble, but if you were hired fresh out of college then your employer will be expecting this. As long as you learn from your mistakes and improve then you won't get fired.
Hmm, even with years of experience, your code may still suck depending on what you have to program and if you ever did that task or not. You might get something I would call "base (in)-competence", depending on how you spend your years, however, this will not change this fact. I do programming since I was 13, and this still happens all the time and I think, it will never end. If a company fires developers for writing bad code then there won't be any developers in the future anymore.
Or let me give you a practical example: We developed a finance API years ago with Java. During that time, it wasn't particularly a requirement to be efficient, because data request wasn't high, and we needed a lot of additional development too such as an Interval Translator because it wasn't sure if the API wouldn't be extended to support other intervals than days, weeks, and months. Nowadays, the customers requirements changed completely, and so instead of daily and monthly intervals, we rather need very short intervals, even in minutes. Long-term-data isn't a requirement anymore, the intervals themselves never changed and so the whole programming process as we did it at the time when using yahoofinance was - from todays point of view - mediocre, to say the least. The API had a huge overhead out of too many hierarchical layers and also many foreign refernences to libraries we might use in one or two occasions, only because no one wanted to write the code itself. You see this in a lot of cases as well. Truly, such a behavior isn't very well thought-out, but the requirement was, that they needed an API like that very fast, so no time to think about efficiency. I am currently cleaning up this project and threw out half of the classes and references, but put a bit more (maybe less than one third) in the classes, with the result that the API itself is finding data almost twice as fast and the compilation process is one third of the time than before. Also the Java version changed to 19 now, which took a lot of time too to debug and fix old code. So from today's point of view, we wrote utter garbage years ago, but it was sufficient enough to work for the customer and that is what mostly counts. But who says that in a few years, another programmer reviews my current written code and also says that's utter garbage too?
Good video. Well explained concepts. Yet some myths about devs are real - a friend of mine became software dev when he was 22. Ten years later he still looks like 22. It's one of reasons I've decided to also become dev ;)
Thank you so much for the lovely comment. If you maintain a regular exercise, eat well, and pay attention to ergonomics, Software Development is an amazing career choice :)
@@bigboxSWE do you think that you can find a completely remote job as a swe ? Idk much about the field but I want to get into it and to work remotely ( from another country )
@@abdallasaeed2480 you can, but if you wanna rise, you gotta show yourself. it also highly depends on the team, if they allow it. agile practises speak against it, but corona forced change. to work from another country might be difficult for small to medium sized companies, so if you dont put a lot on the table, the chances are slim.
I was shocked to see how little of subscribers you got. This was a very good video. Right on, keep the format. it was informative. You got some good skills on the video shots and how you structure, the things you got to say.
I like this video alot. Better than the day in the life where no work is done. This is closely how my day goes as a SWE. Hope to see more videos from you.
This video is nothing short of outstanding. While watching I feel like you were there at my side watching my work and taking notes for this video, it's spot-on. Well, at least it would be if we did sprint plannings, estimates, and code reviews. My project is very much "here's the ticket, fuck you and I'll see you in two weeks."
haha! i've worked at those companies too, i've also worked at companies where there are no tickets, no documentation, and you're told to clone a private repo and login through someone else's account to not overdo the number of people in a private repo LOL. tech is the WILD west
@@nightwind5738 its depressingly realistic because he has done it for 12+ years, so its most likely the hamsterwheel effect for him. i was 15 years in one career, i know the hamsterwheel effect very well.
Ive been a software engineer since graudating college in Dec 2007. Started in Jan 2008. So over 15 years as of writing this. As others have mentioned this is pretty accurate. - Dont forget about the fire drills that interupt your work (very urgent P0 - Like, the website is down and nobody can login since last release issues. Or P1 - They can login but an entire feature they depend on is broken. Like running reports) - Also other injections into your sprint which were not planned for, but are deemed higher priority than your xurrent work. Like, another team has an urgent deadline but they forgot they needed the part of the codebase your teak owns to be updated but they don't have enough resources to update it themselves. - Last thing I'll mention is if you spend any significant amount od time at a company youll write a lot of code and move on. Someone else will inherit your code and, especially if they are a Jr developer or new to the company in general, they will message you and ask you "If you have a minute" because they need you to explain it to them. I actually don't mind helping out but this is why sometimes not kuch gets done in a sprint if you have too many prod issues, injections, and questions about prior projects OR a tech area that you know well but others don't.
Thank you so much! It was my first time doing any sort of video editing and audio recording so I emulated my style from Fireship (please search him as well on UA-cam, he has some awesome content).
My team only has a 30-40 minute meeting per day where we do scrum + discuss any items the entire team can contribute to. Else we just hope on calls to pair program when we need to talk about something directly with a certain person! No ticket estimations, or any like that. My average time that I spend per day on my IDE is around 6-7 hours coding per day. So that's pretty productive in contrast to many meetings or unscheduled time.
That sounds like the dream! I remember working at a startup a few years ago where the environment was just like that. It was amazing just being able to sink away into the code without having to check my calendar for another needless meeting.
@@Rekon-se6wv Hi rekon, I think you're missing the calculations a bit from Saif Ul Islam, he meant he works 7 hours per day programming and the rest on a break/meetings, which is an extremely ideal scenario for programmers, no distractions with meetings :)
The place I work at has none of this, which sucks but it's a manufacturing company with two devs, me and my technical director. We basically get a bug fix from someone in the department and put it into our internal management system or a feature request, then we talk with the person who made the request to evaluate what needs doing. Then I'm mostly left alone to get it done and I ask for help whenever I need it. I've been here for 3 months so far, learned an absolute crap ton so far. Not the best setup, but the stuff i'm working on is interesting and my technical director is hella smart
This video was an absolute gem and earned you a sub. I'll be looking out for more videos in the future. To comment on your description, I would agree that this reminds me very much of a fireship video.
Thank you so much! After seeing the guts of a few companies I began to notice a pattern, and it definitely isn't buffet lunches and 4 coffee breaks per hour.
It is a little chilling how realistic this is. That was exactly my work procedure with my last employer. When I began having a day from 4am - 8pm regularly, I decided to change since this kind of project management was just killing me. Having to explain to the product owner again and again and again, why the customer has to pay more because I couldnt get the estimated job done was just heartbreaking. I hated every second of it. Now I am at an employer who also wants to work agile but we are not an IT service company. That means there is no direct money on the line when a task needs more time.
Finally a video that isnt a 'day in the life of a software engineer' and actually shows you what 99% of people do day to day, also shit bucket had me rolling!
Been working as a Software Engineer for the past 10 months and this video is fairly accurate except at our company we a) don't have dedicated QA (lol) so once the pull request is approved and the branch is merged I can just forget about it and b) have basically zero meetings asides from a daily ~10 minute standup The company I work at is quite small though (10-15 devs)
To be really fair, it makes sense that most of the time is actual research, because that can add A LOT to the actual grunt work. But maybe I am biased because I really like researching as a profession/hobby.
The saddest part that is soon classic software developement will be obsolete because of AI and we will need to forget current complicated but quite interesting and charming ways of software developing...
As a software engineer with 15+ years of experience, I will have to mention one thing, your daily standup meetings kill developers creativity. Enforcing rules in companies where solving problems requires creative thinking. This is why companies end up with workers who the only thing they care is a salary at the end of the month.
I came into this expecting so much disdain and sarcasm, but damn it was solid. Good job on giving a realistic view without crapping on some of the other mobs that are going to be involved
I was a developer from 2000 until 2013 (now I am a manager). In the early 2000s, it was quite normal to have to work on weekends, with a 60-hour workweek, etc. While I don't see that happening on the same scale now, I do observe far more burnouts today than in the past.
I love programming but my god does software engineering suck. Whoever said "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" was WRONG. Doing something you love as a job can make you start hating it instead.
Really refreshing video, as someone currently half way through a computer science degree it gets a bit tiring hearing fellow students talk about it as if we are going to be overnight millionaires once we’re finished
At my current company which is a big tech corporate, it's 5% coding, and 95% meeting, pair programming, mailing, gossipping and other nonsensical stuff. I really want to switch jobs, but my current one is WFH, and I don't want to spend 3 hours in the traffic to get to a new place. It's a struggle. And from the looks of it, the other companies are similar if not worse. It squeezed out the fun of software engineering.
A lot of this we actually do at the programming school I am going to which is cool (but they are kinda really bad at a lot of it but whatever) anyways it is pretty cool to hear that we are doing a lot of this stuff for a reason because they may or may not just forget to explain a lot of stuff and just tell us to do it
Thanks for the video! Very informative, and overall enjoyed the memes that matched the info. Just a tiny detail, maybe make the music a little bit less loud
Lmao meme selection on this one goes too hard 🤣 Gordon Ramsey as QA would have me depressed for certain... and the tennis back and forth is too spot on with QA "Hmm.. was working when I pushed it last night" too accurate
Thank you so much! Did you like the format? I was thinking of moving to a slower slideshow based format but the response of this makes it seems like I'm better off doing it this way. Btw the format idea isn't original. I got it from Fireship, check him out on UA-cam! He's awesome.
I am a junior frontend dev and I would say I only have 2 stand ups a day lasting 15 minutes each. But we could have sprint reviews, retrospectives, Estimation meetings for new Cards. I might spend sometime writing AC for cards but I would say 80% of my day on average is spent coding/designing whether that is bug fixes,features or creating a new prototype in figma. Where I work we do not really have pair programming but we have a team chat and if anyone is free they will help if you have a blocker. After a card is complete you will create a pull request. Someone on the dev team reviews it and it will eventually PASS. Then it moves to QA , hopefully it gets passed by QA then it gets passed to UAT and then hopefully it passes then it gets submitted to the next build 🙂. Quite a lot goes on I have to say but it is super fun! If you work for a good company and have nice colleagues.
I was certain you were describing my company lol, good stuff! Wonder if it would be worth it to do a vid on retros and PI planning and sprint demos. If those are even common practices. Anyhow, good vid!
Yes! When I worked at the smallest company I have till date, most of the tickets were just the founder telling us what customer reviews were saying and to go build those things :)
Ok I am new here and I didn't finish the first video that made me discovered you in the Discord server or Josh 🇩🇪... I am still waiting for the ads to complete before the video start and I will be happy to discover if I am a good candidate for your community 😅😅😅😅
Not every company does sprints, pair programming, or has experienced programmers on the team. Pick the company and role very carefully and watch out for red flags
This might sound elitist but if a company is ready to lock you in fast, chances are they didn't vet their staff and overall your experience (as a junior/intern) will suffer.
The only flags i watch for is green in my bank account, les gooo.
me too leeesss gooooo
What are red flags?
@@coldestbeer sounds more like less-of-a-go.
This is actually a pretty good video. I've been a SWE for 5 years now and this video paints quite a realistic image of what a day in the life looks like for me. Way to go champ.
Thank you so much for your wonderful comment! :) I feel like a lot of content doesn't accurately represent us!
@@bigboxSWE I agree that a lot of content does not accurately represent software engineering. Software engineering itself requires applying engineering principles to proof your software will work. (As opposed to proving written code functions as expected)
There's a lot of people who call themselves software engineers but are instead, senior level developers. Still a note-worthy profession, but definitely not the same. Some people believe they're the same. Though I haven't met a developer yet who can produce engineering level quality products unless they spend 3x (wet finger estimation) the resources.
What are your thoughts on that?
@@msc8382 This is a bizarre comment
@@sneer0101 why is it bizarre for you? Through job applications and degrees, it's very clear there's a difference between programmers and engineers. This video describes a programmer's common day, not that of an engineer. I'm particularily weirded out by the fact that the core component of engineering is not mentioned; how the engineering principles are applied and when. That's the most important aspect doing engineering; applying engineering principles.
I've been a dev for 9 years now... 90% of your time will be spent figuring out how someone else wrote a system and the other 10% will be spent fixing their bugs.
Thank you for providing an actually accurate representation of what it's like. An important bit to highlight is that when you're starting out it'll take a long while to get your bearings on things. Like when I first started my first ticket (which I didn't even start untill about another week in) took me around a week and a half and my PR for it literally changed one line of code. Especially if it's your first time working in a big codebase it's pretty overwhelming to understand everything that's going on, but eventually it gets easier (especially in healthy comps that have a culture of collaboration and pair programming)
Thank you so much for your wonderful comment. Your first 4-5 months as a Jr Developer is absolutely brutal. I had around 1 year of intern experience going into my first full-time gig, and even that didn't help as much. My first merge request (we used GitLab) took me 2 months, and it was adding a csv parser in an import functionality in our java monolith (even with pair programming and a lot of help from senior devs!)
@@BusinessWolf1 should have read the job application 😂
this is exactly what Im experiencing right now. been a week since my first day and still cant understand shit
I'm curious. What was the most challenging about that first merge request?
My company doesn’t allow pair programming. If you ask too many questions of your supervisor, it’s brought up negatively in performance reviews. We also don’t have Jira or Git. We use “SourceSafe” and some old Microsoft equivalent of Jira with no story points or way of quantifying anything. I hate my job.
Loved it. Pleasant style, realistic outlook, no bs. Very Fireship-esque. More please.
These types of videos tend to either really sugar coat the job or really make it sound terrible. I'm glad to finally see a video that splits the difference and shows how, like any job, it has it's ups and downs. It also largely depends on the organization you work for. I see so many people talk about 60 hour weeks and burnout when most of my jobs have been the opposite to the point where I'm bored. As a general rule, the people making the most noise are also the most unhappy.
It all comes down to where you work and your management. If you're a consultant, it comes down to the culture at your firm and the culture of your client.
@@Monochrome93Did you do something in particular to get the "boring" ones?
I'm a Full Stack Engineer and this is one of the most realistic videos I have seen on what being a SWE is actually like.
hahahah thank you! that's why i called reality
Full stack.. Must love the buzzwords, lol
@@justinedse8435why? What’s wrong with the word?
As ive heard fullstack doesnt really exist
@@puch9830 it does, but a hundred times as many people claim to be full stack as actually are full stack. Which is weird - it's not like full stack means you're "better".
I worked as a Software Engineer for a number of years for a very large corporation. At maximum 20% of the time would be spent on coding. Many of the items you mention were practiced there too. With more focus on design up front and directing changes to focus on measurable business results. Lots of things never ever get visited, because they don't really benefit the customer or the business.
What you're describing is 100% of where most of the industry is headed, (bar unicorns and Big-Tech) most companies treat Software Development like their IT department (e.g as a cost centre) even some B2B SaaS orgs I've worked at view it the same. It's quite dreadful and leads to a net negative for everyone.
I'm literally just about to start writing some mocks I started on last night, but could not get to because of stand-up, followed by a emergency call, followed by a planning meeting with my whole agile team, even though I have another meeting with my 'HR manager' in about an hour. I'm just trying to get out of the mindset that actually writing code is the most important thing.
@@kishirisu1268Big tech fired 75% of their staff because they focused far too much on growth rather than profit. Most big tech ran on VC and other investor money sources. When the fed hiked interest rates up, investors started demanding to see ROI or else they'd stop funneling money down the sinkholes these companies were. So the job cuts were first up, except with growth happening far too fast there were way too many teams involved (too many cooks). The result is these companies shedding employees and then shedding features, becoming full of bugs because the product was built with the intention of having way more people maintaining it.
Industry grew way too fast and you're gonna see it happen again with AI
@@ApexGaledo recommend software engineering? I'm considering nursing, business or software engineering
@@autumn399omg what a wild range of interests.. you forgot law btw
It's impressive how companies can suck the fun out of any job.
Yeah. I love the creativeness of coding but watching this put me off x100000
Did someone tell you at some point that being compensated monetarily for your labor is supposed to be “fun”? The vast majority of human beings do not enjoy their day to day tasking because the vast majority of things that need to be done aren’t “fun”. If you spend your life pursuing “fun” at work you will probably spend your whole life in pursuit
@@nyynetails it shouldn't be that way, that's the problem genius
@@Serusshi so every janitor scrap metal collector and rape detective "should be" having a great time were it not for the "man" XD yeah nah bruh once you graduate come see me about "fun". Thats fugazi shit. Yuore allowed 18ish years of fun then 52 years of fun weekends if ur lucky. make the most of em
that's because you can't have good software written by a bunch of monkeys pooping out code with no coordination. If you actually worked as a software dev you would appreciate most of the things mentioned because they help you and others. Nobody is an omnibus that can look at a 1000 file codebase and know everything about it, documentation is needed, meetings are needed to help you progress because you WILL get stuck
To be fair, this is actually the _ideal_ software developer experience. It can be much better or worse. An example of "worse" is if you have "QA driven design" where qa "bugs" are QA telling the devs how to make the program work, or having code that is nested 15 levels deep in an unreadable blob of garbage logic that you can't change without breaking 6 other things. Usually problems like that can be resolved if the team pushes to do things the right way though!
Yep, been there and done that! I'm actually at an org with a very competent QA team, so when they do find something they usually work with the PM to see if the bug is 'worth it'.
oh my God that sounds terrifying, Im 18 and aspire to be a SWE but that just very slightly scares me
How it's ideal if it can be better? No it's the average.
This is pretty much 100% accurate. I'm really fortunate to be working at a company whose management style maximizes dev time as much as possible and is generally pretty understanding of dev time/application needs.
I just finished a NASA internship this May after getting my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. And I can say this is 95% what my days was like. Also, thankful to have worked with a wonderful and supportive team for my learning and development.
You nailed it. I find it depends on the team and developer for pair programming. My current position has no pair programming because all of the experienced developers keep to themselves.
Yes that is quite true as well! This video was geared towards more Junior Developers, I noticed in teams where everyone had over >3 years of experience pair programming was nonexistent, and if you did have issues you can pretty reasonably solve it over Slack or GitLab/GitHub comments.
If I see another 15+ case if-else tree pushed I'm going to cry
We need more content like this.
So tired of the youtuber dev mindset people are trying to use as the status quo. The guy who is very prescriptive pm every little topic and change their tooling and stack every week.
Simply does not exist in most day to day work as a developer, but I don't know why people use the former as a reference...
This was very accurate and funny. Most of the lingo and way of working feels complicated at start, but then you realize it's just some simple steps you need to follow at the end of the day.
I would have to make a separate video on your first 1 month as a Junior Developer, it can be so brutal!
Thank you so much for your lovely comment. :) I hope I brought some value to your YouTubing sesh
Extremely accurate in my experience. Add some random Slack notifications here and there, about half are directed to you and the other half people using @here
Also depending on the company a ton of logging to vpns or asking for permissions, signing in... (all security related)
Oh yep... The company infrastructure, and god forbid you're trying to change some documentation!
I love "Slack-professionalism", just shifting tasks off to other people until someone is stuck with it
@here 😂
Nicely explained.
This is what a well organized workflow looks like. In my 15 years career spread across more than a dozen teams - I worked like that maybe like in 3 of them. Others were fifty shades of chaos.
Thank you Alex! I agree, this is what a 'proper' setup looks like. In a lot of cases, you're the BA/QA/PM as well as Dev :)
Moving from a Junior developer job where I was tasked to do the grunt coding to then starting to have to have client meetings is definitely a work shift for me I have to face at the moment. But then again working in agency where your time can be billable to a client in comparison to a product is quite different.
Brilliant video, really clearly laid out.
Totally agree with the Bitbucket sentiment. 😂
Thank you so much! For a little while I did work in a customer facing role, and I do agree it was quite a shift in perspective from working with an IDE all day. Agency work is quite interesting as well, as you are always moving to something different, never fixed.
For my first Engineering internship I had to use BitBucket, and I made it an oath to always ask what version control/pipeline system the company uses in interviews :)
@@bigboxSWE I'm curious what your detailed opinion of Bitbucket is because I use it at work now?
I find this very useful, as someone who's getting into this world, watching a clear and concise video of the things I will be doing in a work environment makes me realize the things I have to improve beyond coding.
1.Get a job in software that pays the bills, live within your means and save up some money consistently.
2. Don't overwork yourself, switching jobs every 1-2 years is ASTRONOMICALLY more money than fighting for a promotion.
2.1 If you feel overworked, start looking, someone else will pay more. Don't be afraid of new environments or relearning, you do that on the job daily anyway.
3. Start working on side projects (if company doesn't allow side projects see 2.1)
This is pretty accurate for where I work. Definitely plenty of customer support tickets, estimation is usually done by more senior devs or tech leads. Stand up is every morning, showcase, retro, and planning are once a month, I think. We also have fortnightly catch-ups with our team leads, or managers. We're also doing some squad experimentation, if there is a big blocker we have breakout rooms to discuss this issue and can attend that to either help out or learn something. This is to prevent soaking up standup time with issue related rabbit holes.
As a student in college for Software Development my biggest fear is getting a job and not knowing wtf I'm doing and getting fired, like what if my code just sucks, or I fumble 🙃. Hopefully someone can calm my fears and anxiety
As a junior your code will suck, you will fumble, but if you were hired fresh out of college then your employer will be expecting this. As long as you learn from your mistakes and improve then you won't get fired.
15980 years later "I have no idea what I'm doing and why I'm not fired yet" 11 of 10 SWE senior principal CEO of company X lol
With 4+ years under my belt I keep my desk sparse so when I get told to pack it up I’m ready in 5 minutes
Hmm, even with years of experience, your code may still suck depending on what you have to program and if you ever did that task or not.
You might get something I would call "base (in)-competence", depending on how you spend your years, however, this will not change this fact.
I do programming since I was 13, and this still happens all the time and I think, it will never end.
If a company fires developers for writing bad code then there won't be any developers in the future anymore.
Or let me give you a practical example:
We developed a finance API years ago with Java. During that time, it wasn't particularly a requirement to be efficient, because data request wasn't high, and we needed a lot of additional development too such as an Interval Translator because it wasn't sure if the API wouldn't be extended to support other intervals than days, weeks, and months.
Nowadays, the customers requirements changed completely, and so instead of daily and monthly intervals, we rather need very short intervals, even in minutes. Long-term-data isn't a requirement anymore, the intervals themselves never changed and so the whole programming process as we did it at the time when using yahoofinance was - from todays point of view - mediocre, to say the least.
The API had a huge overhead out of too many hierarchical layers and also many foreign refernences to libraries we might use in one or two occasions, only because no one wanted to write the code itself.
You see this in a lot of cases as well. Truly, such a behavior isn't very well thought-out, but the requirement was, that they needed an API like that very fast, so no time to think about efficiency.
I am currently cleaning up this project and threw out half of the classes and references, but put a bit more (maybe less than one third) in the classes, with the result that the API itself is finding data almost twice as fast and the compilation process is one third of the time than before. Also the Java version changed to 19 now, which took a lot of time too to debug and fix old code.
So from today's point of view, we wrote utter garbage years ago, but it was sufficient enough to work for the customer and that is what mostly counts.
But who says that in a few years, another programmer reviews my current written code and also says that's utter garbage too?
Good video. Well explained concepts. Yet some myths about devs are real - a friend of mine became software dev when he was 22. Ten years later he still looks like 22. It's one of reasons I've decided to also become dev ;)
Thank you so much for the lovely comment. If you maintain a regular exercise, eat well, and pay attention to ergonomics, Software Development is an amazing career choice :)
@@bigboxSWE do you think that you can find a completely remote job as a swe ?
Idk much about the field but I want to get into it and to work remotely ( from another country )
@@abdallasaeed2480 you can, but if you wanna rise, you gotta show yourself. it also highly depends on the team, if they allow it. agile practises speak against it, but corona forced change.
to work from another country might be difficult for small to medium sized companies, so if you dont put a lot on the table, the chances are slim.
GPT-5 and above will replace your job
@@MazinAlbushraNah, it might make it faster though, but until AI becomes sentient with a greater intelligence than us it’s always going to be a tool.
I was shocked to see how little of subscribers you got. This was a very good video. Right on, keep the format.
it was informative. You got some good skills on the video shots and how you structure, the things you got to say.
Thank you so much! I will be making a few more videos and will definitely keep your feedback at heart. Thank you for the lovely comment :)
WHATT HOW SO LITTLE
He got 2 vids give him time
@@itaypooO when I wrote the comment he had 54 Subs.
@@thelittleerik4806 damn. @bigboxSWE remember us when ur famous
New to software engineering, this video helped me understand swe very well!
Thank you so much Huzaifa! I hope you gained a more realistic perspective of the industry!
I like this video alot. Better than the day in the life where no work is done. This is closely how my day goes as a SWE.
Hope to see more videos from you.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. I will be posting more videos that are more aligned with the reality of SWE!
This video is nothing short of outstanding. While watching I feel like you were there at my side watching my work and taking notes for this video, it's spot-on.
Well, at least it would be if we did sprint plannings, estimates, and code reviews. My project is very much "here's the ticket, fuck you and I'll see you in two weeks."
haha! i've worked at those companies too, i've also worked at companies where there are no tickets, no documentation, and you're told to clone a private repo and login through someone else's account to not overdo the number of people in a private repo LOL. tech is the WILD west
@@bigboxSWE what a nightmare hahaha, yeah there are crazy places out there. Luckily we get paid well enough to deal with that.
Just started my first job, and you’ve 100% described the process there.
As a guy who's done software development for 12+ years now, the breakdown is depressingly realistic
be more specific
@@nightwind5738 its depressingly realistic because he has done it for 12+ years, so its most likely the hamsterwheel effect for him. i was 15 years in one career, i know the hamsterwheel effect very well.
Ive been a software engineer since graudating college in Dec 2007. Started in Jan 2008. So over 15 years as of writing this.
As others have mentioned this is pretty accurate.
- Dont forget about the fire drills that interupt your work
(very urgent P0 - Like, the website is down and nobody can login since last release issues.
Or P1 - They can login but an entire feature they depend on is broken. Like running reports)
- Also other injections into your sprint which were not planned for, but are deemed higher priority than your xurrent work. Like, another team has an urgent deadline but they forgot they needed the part of the codebase your teak owns to be updated but they don't have enough resources to update it themselves.
- Last thing I'll mention is if you spend any significant amount od time at a company youll write a lot of code and move on. Someone else will inherit your code and, especially if they are a Jr developer or new to the company in general, they will message you and ask you "If you have a minute" because they need you to explain it to them.
I actually don't mind helping out but this is why sometimes not kuch gets done in a sprint if you have too many prod issues, injections, and questions about prior projects OR a tech area that you know well but others don't.
Why would new employees reach out to you? Didn't you document your code?
Bro the meme editing is really sick. Well done
Thank you so much! It was my first time doing any sort of video editing and audio recording so I emulated my style from Fireship (please search him as well on UA-cam, he has some awesome content).
@@bigboxSWE You're most welcome!😁I also watch Fireship. He makes really good content too.
@@bigboxSWE You’ve gained a sub 😂. I love Jeff’s style. Awesome content here too 👍🏽
Yeath this is very accurate!
:)
This is exactly what I experience in my job! Very accurate video
Thank you, this is the first video I've seen that seems to give a more realistic scope of what I'll be doing if I get into software development.
I just started as a SWE this year and this is exactly how things work at our company. Great video
*The company you work for, not your company. Remember that always.
My team only has a 30-40 minute meeting per day where we do scrum + discuss any items the entire team can contribute to. Else we just hope on calls to pair program when we need to talk about something directly with a certain person! No ticket estimations, or any like that.
My average time that I spend per day on my IDE is around 6-7 hours coding per day. So that's pretty productive in contrast to many meetings or unscheduled time.
That sounds like the dream! I remember working at a startup a few years ago where the environment was just like that. It was amazing just being able to sink away into the code without having to check my calendar for another needless meeting.
@@bigboxSWE How is working everyday 7 hours (which is more than a regular 9 to 5 job / 5x2) a dream job?
@@Rekon-se6wv Hi rekon, I think you're missing the calculations a bit from Saif Ul Islam, he meant he works 7 hours per day programming and the rest on a break/meetings, which is an extremely ideal scenario for programmers, no distractions with meetings :)
@@Rekon-se6wv as a swe you have to get shit done
There's no such thing as working 2 hrs
@@bigboxSWE still 49 hours a week (more than an average wageslave job), plus the timewasting meetings
Its over for NEETbros
The place I work at has none of this, which sucks but it's a manufacturing company with two devs, me and my technical director. We basically get a bug fix from someone in the department and put it into our internal management system or a feature request, then we talk with the person who made the request to evaluate what needs doing. Then I'm mostly left alone to get it done and I ask for help whenever I need it. I've been here for 3 months so far, learned an absolute crap ton so far. Not the best setup, but the stuff i'm working on is interesting and my technical director is hella smart
This video was an absolute gem and earned you a sub. I'll be looking out for more videos in the future. To comment on your description, I would agree that this reminds me very much of a fireship video.
This is 100% accurate, I'm glad I found this channel
Nice video. Of course not every developer will have the same experience, but everyone has at least a bit of everything in this video.
Thank you so much! After seeing the guts of a few companies I began to notice a pattern, and it definitely isn't buffet lunches and 4 coffee breaks per hour.
Manager being the main concern in your life is soo true. About to change jobs because of this.
Very important and overlooked aspect of the job people forget to discuss!
It is a little chilling how realistic this is. That was exactly my work procedure with my last employer. When I began having a day from 4am - 8pm regularly, I decided to change since this kind of project management was just killing me. Having to explain to the product owner again and again and again, why the customer has to pay more because I couldnt get the estimated job done was just heartbreaking. I hated every second of it. Now I am at an employer who also wants to work agile but we are not an IT service company. That means there is no direct money on the line when a task needs more time.
Finally a video that isnt a 'day in the life of a software engineer' and actually shows you what 99% of people do day to day, also shit bucket had me rolling!
thanks man. love your gif/memes picking ability. keep it up.
Thank you! A lot more time goes into picking them than you may know :)
I just started software engineering school couple months ago looking forward for the future !
Been working as a Software Engineer for the past 10 months and this video is fairly accurate except at our company we a) don't have dedicated QA (lol) so once the pull request is approved and the branch is merged I can just forget about it and b) have basically zero meetings asides from a daily ~10 minute standup
The company I work at is quite small though (10-15 devs)
The memes, gifs, pics, and clips are so good.
To be really fair, it makes sense that most of the time is actual research, because that can add A LOT to the actual grunt work. But maybe I am biased because I really like researching as a profession/hobby.
Well done sir. The Ramsey QA bit got me good
Thank you so much Noah. It seems as though my many months of watching Kitchen Nightmares has finally come in handy!
I am still a student and this is really alien thing for me; good to know what we will be actually doing in job thanks
I am an intern and holy crap this is so accurate (except instead of daily standup it's a weekly one)
The saddest part that is soon classic software developement will be obsolete because of AI and we will need to forget current complicated but quite interesting and charming ways of software developing...
As a software engineer with 15+ years of experience, I will have to mention one thing, your daily standup meetings kill developers creativity. Enforcing rules in companies where solving problems requires creative thinking. This is why companies end up with workers who the only thing they care is a salary at the end of the month.
Got rid of everything from my old life to be a developer…looks like i picked the wrong line of work based on this video…
Update?
thank god for the honest and genuine not trying to sell bs devs on youtube
I honestly love the clips you use in these🤣
Holy moly, this channel has grown nicely from the Primogen's reaction :D
is it only me, or the pure chaos sounds like it could be fun to reminisce about
I came into this expecting so much disdain and sarcasm, but damn it was solid.
Good job on giving a realistic view without crapping on some of the other mobs that are going to be involved
I work 10 hours a day in an Italian startup and i love every second of it
This is literally the most useful video for any guy doing code stuff for a job
Thank you so much! I will be making a more focused video on the day-to-day of a dev, and what a workday looks like :)
Very well explained. Please continue making such videos!
Thank you so much! I will make a few more videos in the future following a similar style :)
This was the most real video about software development i ever saw
This is the most realistic video I've ever seen we do EVERYTHING on this vid !
As an aspiring developer, I already planned on becoming a gardener for the rest of my days.
This is a throwback to my Systems Analysis textbook.
I was a developer from 2000 until 2013 (now I am a manager). In the early 2000s, it was quite normal to have to work on weekends, with a 60-hour workweek, etc. While I don't see that happening on the same scale now, I do observe far more burnouts today than in the past.
If you have web dev related task. Contact me...Skills: HTML, CSS, JS, react, sql
Good channel, talking about general industry issues. Keep it up!
Damn, what a banger first video
As a freelance web dev, I do much the same thing. Well, minus the pair programming. Pretty accurate even when you are self-employed.
Thank you for this video. It’s helpful for foundational understanding and mental prep for all the future meetings haha
Thank you Saran for your wonderful comment :)
I love programming but my god does software engineering suck.
Whoever said "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" was WRONG.
Doing something you love as a job can make you start hating it instead.
It’s not the work. It’s how the work is managed by OTHERS that grinds my gears.
Really refreshing video, as someone currently half way through a computer science degree it gets a bit tiring hearing fellow students talk about it as if we are going to be overnight millionaires once we’re finished
Thank you , had such a clear understanding..Great video!
the amount of shade on tech lead is beautiful
That is incredible accurate! Good job! 👍
At my current company which is a big tech corporate, it's 5% coding, and 95% meeting, pair programming, mailing, gossipping and other nonsensical stuff. I really want to switch jobs, but my current one is WFH, and I don't want to spend 3 hours in the traffic to get to a new place. It's a struggle. And from the looks of it, the other companies are similar if not worse. It squeezed out the fun of software engineering.
As a QA analyst, i can confirm that the developers hate us.
A lot of this we actually do at the programming school I am going to which is cool (but they are kinda really bad at a lot of it but whatever) anyways it is pretty cool to hear that we are doing a lot of this stuff for a reason because they may or may not just forget to explain a lot of stuff and just tell us to do it
Thanks for the video! Very informative, and overall enjoyed the memes that matched the info. Just a tiny detail, maybe make the music a little bit less loud
Love the Immortal Technique beat in the video
Thank you!
Lmao meme selection on this one goes too hard 🤣 Gordon Ramsey as QA would have me depressed for certain... and the tennis back and forth is too spot on with QA "Hmm.. was working when I pushed it last night"
too accurate
10/10 🌟
Thank you Jeremy :) The Gordon Ramsay QA bit was very spontaneous! I couldn't find a proper QA clip so I figured, "who's a real life QA?"
Great content, super informative! Subbed and notoed!
Must say spot on! Excellent video
Thank you so much! Did you like the format? I was thinking of moving to a slower slideshow based format but the response of this makes it seems like I'm better off doing it this way. Btw the format idea isn't original. I got it from Fireship, check him out on UA-cam! He's awesome.
Coding is passion. These processes usually suck the life out of you. Very very rare to find a good team
I am a junior frontend dev and I would say I only have 2 stand ups a day lasting 15 minutes each. But we could have sprint reviews, retrospectives, Estimation meetings for new Cards. I might spend sometime writing AC for cards but I would say 80% of my day on average is spent coding/designing whether that is bug fixes,features or creating a new prototype in figma. Where I work we do not really have pair programming but we have a team chat and if anyone is free they will help if you have a blocker. After a card is complete you will create a pull request. Someone on the dev team reviews it and it will eventually PASS. Then it moves to QA , hopefully it gets passed by QA then it gets passed to UAT and then hopefully it passes then it gets submitted to the next build 🙂. Quite a lot goes on I have to say but it is super fun! If you work for a good company and have nice colleagues.
I think I’m most excited about pair programming
Totally accurate. Fantastic realistic picture.
I was certain you were describing my company lol, good stuff! Wonder if it would be worth it to do a vid on retros and PI planning and sprint demos. If those are even common practices. Anyhow, good vid!
I think these videos are great to avoid getting slackers into something they aren’t interested in.
I need to send this to my mom so she understands I do not fix wifi routers.
That depends. Smaller companies you might be the one even making up the tickets as you go, you're closer to the client.
Yes! When I worked at the smallest company I have till date, most of the tickets were just the founder telling us what customer reviews were saying and to go build those things :)
Your right above your words. But, no matter how long it takes and how hard it gets. I'll take the risk.
you got a new subscriber, keep it up and you'll get to million subs
learned a lot from this, im subscribing
I can’t wait to see what you do next? Please share all details, thank you
First I loled because how accurate this is. Then i cried realizing it’s me rn
I just wanted to be a software engineer so when i introduce myself i can say im a software engineer it just seems like a very respected profession
Two weeks on my intern program & this's so freakin' true~
Jesus, you described my fucking life, thank you! This video is something that I wanted to see when I started working as programmer for a company.
Nice content man! Keep it up
Ok I am new here and I didn't finish the first video that made me discovered you in the Discord server or Josh 🇩🇪... I am still waiting for the ads to complete before the video start and I will be happy to discover if I am a good candidate for your community 😅😅😅😅