Software Engineering Is Doom and Gloom - So Watch This!

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all right it is Monday November 18th I checked um time to go to the office uh was definitely beat up after CrossFit and had to nap a little um this mic feels like it's just in the wrong spot anyway um so I feel feel like a human again which is nice uh but I do have topics to talk about on the drivein and then drive home and these are submitted to me so um again if you want me to talk about stuff like just write it in the comments I'm happy to to try and figure out like how to how to address it um you know like the other what was it yesterday I did a video like just from home like not on the commute that was someone wanted to know like what stuff I'm interested in outside of work um so there you

go there's some insight into my life it's uh super super super exciting uh but yeah honestly like you know I I'm doing this because number one I hate doing nothing stuck in traffic and number two I think it could be helpful so if I'm able to help by going over stuff you want to hear about let me know so if you're comfortable leaving it in the comments because it's open-ended and generic like that's great um if you want me to kind of go through a scenario and anonymize it and stuff like I get that you might not want to write something out in the comments so it's that's totally cool but uh feel free like shoot me a message on social media uh probably uh like I will see it on LinkedIn um I I have like a premium profile so you should be able

I think you can message me that way um Twitter uh I don't even know if blue sky has DMS if it does I haven't even checked where to see them so um you can message me there but yeah pick a platform send me a message sorry I don't see it right away um sometimes the notifications I have turned off because I'll get spammed by God knows what so I periodically go like comb through them and look for things I can actually address and not like you know like join this thing for Bitcoin or something about buying watches like so I will go check them out um but yeah like we've already G through uh a couple of topics that were submitted in so today's topic is going to be again someone left to comment around uh like hey there's a lot of stuff that they're

seeing that's uh sort of like Doom and Gloom for software Engineers like that's basically all they see and kind of interesting if you think about it because if this is a topic that's going to get people's emotions going and it's relevant because of AI and uh I mean over the past few years with layoff off and stuff like there's all these things that you can like as someone who's trying to get attention there's all these things you can tap into that will get emotions for people going right so um like obviously the news is very good at this like anything that's going to make people feel some sort of way that's uncomfortable they're going to make news about it so um it's just a common tactic but I mean there are a lot of things going on that make the situation difficult so no denying

that but I wanted to start this off because they were saying like can you can you tell us about some of the good stuff like what do we have to look forward to like can we like can we have a spin on this and I'm happy to talk through that but what I wanted to say before getting into it is like um I I what's a good way to say this I I recognize that there's a lot of things that are going on like layoffs uh like all of the AI stuff when you look at the job graphs and stuff like they're in my opinion they're misleading there's a huge spike in open jobs during Co after the initial drop there was like immediate layoffs from shutdowns because companies like were just like oh crap we're screwed um immediately after that if you look at

the open jaw positions they Skyrocket and that's because there's a bunch of companies that are big enough that were making money from from cloud Tech in in some way or another and they said hey look everyone's stuck at home everyone needs to be remote like this is such a good opportunity and all of these companies scaled ridiculously fast even really big companies hired on tons of people the data is out there go look it up I don't have it in front of me I'm literally driving a car um but what ends up happening right is like that's not a sustainable thing it's just not so people were playing catch up because they were like oh look like so many people are at home then they over index on hiring people for it and then what starts to happen is especially when there's like weird things

going on with the economy um so like things like interest rates affect big tech companies um in a negative way so they end up having to like try and undo it and that results in tons of offs right like it's not I'm not trying to defend any any company that has done this like I work at Microsoft Microsoft has done layoffs like Amazon's done layoffs all these companies have done layoffs I'm not defending it I'm just trying to explain like this is a thing that's happening so when you look at all of these available jobs over the past few years and now they're getting crushed in terms of available jobs like that was a bubble that was a bubble so that's the first thing I want to call it the second second thing I want to call out is like getting into being a like

to be a software developer was never an easy thing so I I don't actually understand where this narrative came from and and I'm not saying this like directly at the person who asked about this topic um because I think it's a good topic um but I I don't want people that are coming into the industry thinking like oh like we're so screwed now because it used to be so easy like hell no it was not ever an easy thing to get into just like before anyone can go write code right like everyone could go write code now to go get a job like are there like did the requirements suddenly change no what you're experiencing right now is that like there's a lot more remote work so people are able to apply to jobs in tremendous amounts of volume because they say I don't need

to be in that area so you're experiencing that that's that's for sure but the requirements and all of that like that it's not like that suddenly got easier or sorry like was easier now it's suddenly become more difficult so I always like going back and like explaining like I I took like a air quotes like traditional route to become a software developer and when I say traditional route I mean like you know you graduate high school you're going to go for postsecondary education and then you're going to go get your degree then you're going to go apply for jobs okay so that's the like traditional route and uh very interesting like I guess like it's not necessarily traditional these days um which is good there's a lot more variety uh in in ways that you can become a software developer but I've shared this story

before like I did that because I wanted to have the title of software engineer and in Canada to be a professional software engineer you need to meet certain requirements so I personally set myself up to go to a school that's an accredited that has an accredited uh engineering program that it's also a requirement it's not just any Secondary School postsecondary school sorry and for me like I went through 5 years of University I went through 5 years of University and I did six internships so like when I graduate from that I better have an unfair Advantage because I worked straight at school or like on the job for 5 years if there is no Advantage from doing that like then that's a huge waste of time so what I'm trying to say is like that was not easy those are some of like the five

hardest years of my life and I did that so that I could enable myself to go get a job more easily because when I go to apply for my full-time positions I have two full years of work experience from internships now that's not like a magic thing because yes those were paid internships was the pay good no but I was a student and I got paid for it so like that's great so you can create those opportunities you can search for those opportunities like you can do things that give unfair advantages like that um but it's not easy and it takes time like for me that was 5 years and at that point what like I'm trying to think I'd already been programming for 4 years before that so it's not like I decided one day like I'm going to be a software developer and

then like I spent like I I'm not picking on boot camp people for this by the way but I didn't just go to a boot camp for 6 months or say screw it I going to be self-taught for a year that was 9 years of being self so in total of self being selftaught and then going to University for it and then getting a full-time job it's never been easy okay so just for the record it's never been easy okay now that's out of the way what are the awesome things that we have to look forward to when being a software engineer and that's going to wrap up today's conversation now I'm just kidding um I just need a sip of water but wouldn't it be funny if I just ended it there because there was nothing to look forward to no um there is

a lot and I think um like truthfully not everyone will enjoy being a software engineer as you might expect um and I think there's a handful of things that you need to like understand that I I would think make the job enjoyable one is that you will be working with people so if your head you're like I hate working with people I can't wait to develop software so I never have to do that you probably want to build software on your own then and never apply to jobs um because you're going to be building it with other people like the entire time so if that is uncomfortable for you you're probably not going to enjoy it and the second thing I would say is like you probably want to love solving problems if that's not something that excites you like you get enjoyment about being

stuck on something and then overcoming it you're not going to enjoy it the good news is if you do like working with people and you do like overcoming challenges it's a great opportunity you're going to have lots of that so from the perspective of like what things do you have to look forward to like I I want to share some examples of like some stuff that I've done in my career and I'm not going to go through like the I don't want to use it as like a highlight reel I just want to use them as examples of things that I think are like you can also do stuff like this okay so first of all um I started work at startups so um my internships were either at startups or small companies and my first full-time job outside of uh like once I had

graduated was at a startup so if you're the kind of person who's going to go to a startup I think one of the things you have to look forward to is growth at a company like actually watching the company grow is very very cool and you get to like realize that you are truly part of that um it's a really interesting feeling and I think if you're not paying attention to it cuz it's kind of hard to to always be observing it but if you go say like a year at a startup and you can see the growth of it and then like you're sticking around as the company's growing it's a really good opportunity to reflect and say like I'm literally helping this entire company grow now when you're at a big tech company it's a lot harder to observe that kind of thing

like for example I don't go to Microsoft and I'm like hey man like I added like you know x% to the company's stock value um or I've like revolutionized Microsoft um that kind of thing is very very rare So if you're going to smaller companies you can literally feel like you're having a whole impact on the business now that's not to say like what I do at Microsoft does not have companywide impact I actually am working on projects that do which which is exciting but those opportunities feel a lot more rare especially if you're just starting out but um you know when I was at a startup we had uh we had interns that were helping build our our automation pipelines for building like our cicd Pipeline and like that transformed how our engineering teams worked because we were before that using an intern to

build the well became a full-time employee but we're using a guy's person or not personal computer using his work computer to like build everything and then we'd copy the files and ship them like it was just not it's not good um you don't want to be doing that so like there's these things when the company is small that like when you do them you can have a very big impact and I think that's a really cool experience as a software developer so that's one uh on that same sort of uh train of thought it doesn't have to be at a startup it can be big tech company as well but like something that's really cool is a software developer uh it's a lot more common if you're working like in in like a user facing product area so whether it's a shipped product a website

if you're working on a platform it's sometimes harder to like get this feeling um I just realized I'm in the fast lane behind this truck and he's not going the speed limit see I think before I realized that I wasn't mad now I'm mad um so if you're uh like building user facing products you have this really cool opportunity to like to see people using what you've built to get feedback on what you've built and like it's a really interesting experience cuz it's like you build stuff say You're Building your hobby projects and it's fun or whatever cuz you're enjoying the process of building but when you when you know that there's like literally people on the other end and it could be hundreds thousands millions of people using a feature that you've built like that is a really cool feeling um for me at

the at the startup that I was at that uh ended up you know growing pretty big the um the scale that we were at in terms of uh like helping you know the number of users and that kind of thing it obviously wasn't like a Microsoft scale so so not like planetary scale impact but what was different for us is like we built digital forensic software so we were helping like uh law enforcement uh investigators examiners be able to go help like basically prove uh like whether people were innocent or not uh guilty or innocent so a lot of that though got used uh like very unfortunately in like uh in uh like child sexual abuse material so like it's a pretty dark kind of thing like it's it's uncomfortable to talk about uh but but when you man when you when you're building stuff

and you like you know that you're helping with that kind of thing um like I can I can say to this day from a work perspective there is nothing and I don't I truthfully don't think there will be there's nothing that's been as rewarding as being able to work on that kind of thing to help out um we would have like you know uh our the users come in like examiners investigators come in and like present to us and explain how how they used our software uh you know to help basically catch pedophiles and um and kind of prove that they were guilty and they would talk about the features and stuff they use and if it wasn't something that you worked on directly like you would know who else was working on it kind of thing and you were like like that's why we

build this stuff like just the most um the reward the most rewarding kind of feeling to know like you help with something like that so it's like just knowing that you have impact like that is pretty incredible uh and it doesn't have to be like you know in this case I'm talking about digital forensics um it could be anything right like if you're motivated by your company's mission for us at the digital friendsies company it was a pretty powerful Mission um but like not everyone's going to want to be behind that and do that every day say if you're working at like a you know a green tech company and um and you're having an impact that way and that gets you excited like awesome so you have to look forward to you have like these opportunities where you are having an impact in a

space that you're very aligned with that makes you feel fulfilled so I would say like that's probably one of the big things um one second my mouth is going to dry we switch gears a little bit um talk about like people I guess you're going to be able to work with all sorts of different people and I think there's a lot to learn about people interactions I'm a little biased obviously because I am a manager so uh a lot of my a lot of my work is focused on people interactions but um I think that it's really cool personally that you have these these opportunities where you can learn from like some of like you know the most intelligent people right and maybe you have to work with someone who's super brilliant but like um maybe they're challenging and other ways and maybe you're working

with someone else who's like uh maybe they're they're more Junior like so you know maybe they don't have tons and tons of experience but you know they have such curiosity and they're eager and you get to work with individuals like this where uh even if you're not like managing them I mean like you're you're seeing you're seeing how they approach things and it's like it's exciting it's exciting to observe because they're just so into it and I think as a software developer again you're going to be working with people and I think if you sort of take some opportunity to like I don't know to like step back and think like I'm going to be working with all sorts of different people some of it's going to be challenging for sure but you have so many opportunities to learn from different people uh and that's

why I was trying to give an example doesn't have to be someone who's an expert at something you can you can learn like there's people that are you know they're more J but they're so eager and they approach problem solving in different ways and maybe you can learn something about that right instead of maybe you're more senior and you're like you're kind of stuck in your ways of like hey there's you know we got to stick to these Technologies or here's what works like look at the people that are more Junior that are like you know that are really taken off and you'll you'll probably see some traits that are pretty interesting and you know it's worth reflecting on so I think the people side is really cool um if you don't like people like I said maybe might not be in the field for

you um S I got a bunch of lanes to move over um I do think too like there's it depends where you work but like career progression can be can be fun right like uh did I just say that out loud that's kind of weird um uh I I don't I guess personally I don't think the nitty-gritty of career progression is fun but I think it's uh it's cool to think about that like you have this whole like I don't know I play a lot of role playing games right so we are the character in our own role playing game and and truly you can take different directions in your career and I think that's a really exciting thing so I know uh getting started obviously we talked about this in the beginning like challenging times yes but it's always been challenging um but once

you're kind of in the space I'm not saying that it's it's necessarily like easy after that pardon me where's my voice going um it's not necessarily easy after that but I think you get some experience under your belt and you have you start to understand a little bit better like how things work uh in in the industry and when I was saying career progression is like exciting I mean you can you can think about where you want to go in your career like do you want to be writing code for the rest of your career like for me I always want some like code to be involved in some way so for me it's different because in my career I don't have that so that's an interesting kind of pivot for me but like I write code every day outside of work so I found

a way to make sure that I still had something I loved uh even without it being at work all the time but you get to make decisions like that you can decide like what industry you want to go work in right like what other and I'm sure there people have examples of this I'm not trying to say there aren't but off the top of my head I can't think of any other industry where you can say like I am X so I am a software developer and then you can literally do software development in any industry that exists you could be a software developer for agriculture you could be a software developer for veterinary stuff for medicine for finance for for other software for like anything and I think that that's so cool because you can work in the space and you might say like

oh man this isn't the my first job it's not what I wanted I can't be doing this my whole life but yeah you're in there now like build some experience learn how to build software learn learn how to work in teams and like there's always other opportunities there always will be and for someone who's listening to me saying that and go yeah but what about AI we'll do another talk on AI sometime but like things are going to evolve I'm not saying that they're not I think 100% they're going to evolve but like unless the entire world is just run by AI Automation and we already have robots that can do the physical part like there's still going to be jobs um unless they have the robots repairing the robots like I mean whatever we're not going down that rabbit hole but my point is

like there's always going to be different industries that you can go move into and there's always going to be different types of roles that you could explore so if you are a software developer maybe you do want to become a manager um I know one of the one of the software engineers I work with at the startup company I mentioned very early on like so I was managing people and he was managing product so he switched from being a a software engineer by trade to a product manager and he's a very technical product manager so he has like a bit of a superpower there right for some of you that have worked with product managers like um it's kind of like as an engineering manager I don't think engineering managers have to code um um I've talked about this before but a product manager I

wouldn't expect they know how to code but when they can when they can Bridge the technical Gap more easily it makes having conversations way more effective and that is a superpower so I think that you have opportunities to explore that way in your career development and that's kind of what I mean by like career progression is exciting I don't personally find like how am I going to I don't know like work on this project and tie it to my career progress like that like it's important I don't find that exciting personally um for me like one of the ones I don't find exciting at all is like visibility at work like how do I do this but also make sure that I have visibility across the organization so that people will acknowledge me for promotion and it's like I don't know it's that's not exting

to me at all um but the the idea like I am I'm a manager over uh over Engineers um when I was at that start out I don't like talking about this stuff like I have uh I don't mean for it to sound like I'm I'm stuck right like I'm stuck in my ways like oh the startup oh the startup that I was at um I just I like sharing because there's experiences there uh but at that startup before I left like I was basically uh they were opening up like a an a director position like an architect director position and uh just basically forming it so I would have been at a director level uh four years ago um that company's over 500 people now so like I would have been a director potentially a VP there now um and I would have been

a you know manager over other managers without a doubt and now like at Microsoft I am a manager over software engineers and I've been doing that for like 4 and 1/2 years um so like for me it's exciting to know that there will be a day where I am managing other managers and um it's it's kind of funny because like from a career progression perspective like that's exciting to me because when I started Dev leader in 2013 my goal was to basically help other engineering managers so for me that's been a long time of like like a long time coming like I'm looking forward to that so I think for other software developers there's probably other things like this in your career where you know you you put the the ground workor in and you work towards them and that could be very rewarding so

um yeah I'm almost at the office I don't know if that was too much of like a all over the place kind of look at things but I think there's a lot to be excited about as a software developer um I didn't even talk about the pay the pay is pretty good um depending where you're working I guess but the pay can be pretty good um you're working with generally working with technology that hopefully is like newer and kind of exciting not always um but like that's a possibility so I don't know like I I have a hard time imagining other career path let's put it that way like I don't know what it would be like to go work in a different industry that's not software um truthfully like it feels kind of weird uh but I think in software development we have so

many different paths so many different opportunities and it's because software is everywhere um and you might not like how One company does it and you switch to another company and everything's very much aligned with like your philosophies on things like it's there's just so much potential for for cool experiences in my opinion so um I hope that helps have a little bit of positive light it's not like you know you're never going to get a job and then when you do it all sucks um it's uh I feel like a little bit more positive than that but for you to decide as you continue on your career so I'm just going to park as I'm doing that though the uh topics that are coming up are Day in the Life topic so someone said hey like what does it look like what's a day in

the life of a software developer and I mean hard for me to answer because I don't do that anymore um no but I can I can give some perspective um can try to talk about like how things looked before like at the startup versus at Microsoft um and then I'll do another day in the life as an engineering manager so you can understand that uh I will film those in the car I'm not I joked on something my brain's mush um I'm not going to bring you into the office or like even from home and like show you what I'm working on like I'm not doing that but I'll walk you through it I just don't think that that's like a like like privacy and security concerns for that I don't want to like have a slip up of something where I'm like ah maybe

I shouldn't have put that on the internet um and I don't edit these so I'm not doing that but we'll talk about it so on the drive home I will talk about day in the life of a software developer um and hopefully find that exciting I just realized my camera is all over the place sorry it's me now um yeah I think that's it though so I will see you later take care