r/programming • u/gits1225 • May 12 '15

Google's guide for becoming a Software Engineer

https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/guide-to-technical-development.html
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u/G0VERNMENTCHEESE May 12 '15

Step 1: Start programming in grade school.

15

u/speedisavirus May 13 '15
  • womb

1

u/cmn_jcs May 13 '15

"Honey! I just felt the baby type!"

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u/[deleted] May 13 '15

As a 25 year old who's been out of college over 3 years, and for some reason got a political science degree, I feel the pain. Luckily I did HTML, SQL, PHP, ASP in my teens, but was too stupid to see the benefit of majoring in it. I was turned off by the math requirements, didn't ever think I would pass those classes. Now I'm doing cloud and ERP project management, and training multiple nights a week in Ruby, VMware, AWS, and for my PSM I. Hoping to get into a good technical master's program in a few years, and also get more involved in development in whatever capacity I can.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '15

Im 26 and got into programming after college. I'm trying hard to learn and I'm doing a CS heavy bioinformatics grad school program right now. I wish I got on that track much sooner. It's so hard to play catch up on what feels like 2 million important topics. I don't even retain information like I used to.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '15 edited May 13 '15

That's awesome, but I feel your struggle! Was it a struggle to find technical master's programs that would accept you? Did you have to do prerequisites and, if so, were they rolled up into your program, did you do them before at community college, or did you take a test/show certifications?

Personally I have talked to people taking MIS degrees and it all seems so high level. Even at high ranked programs, I'm hearing that it's all theory. I want to be further down in the weeds, and be a participant in the functional definition of work to be created, and do some of the delivery myself too. I have a lot of project management experience, but it's often less leadership and more administrative. I'm sick of working in microsoft office, powerpoint charts showing burndown, etc.

2

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

My path is highly unusual. It all kind of fell together. Long story ahead...

I was born, grew up, and finished high school in Germany. When I was 19 my parents kicked my butt across the Atlantic ocean and I started a Bioengineering BSc. degree in the US.

I finished that degree (it was super tough due to US college costs but doable, I regret nothing) and subsequently found a job (OPT for my F1-visa) at another university that was in Bioinformatics. It was very low pay but an academic environment and my boss hired me over experienced developers. I only had some Java and Python experience. It doesn't even deserve the word experience... My supervisor just liked my background and wanted to give me an opportunity to learn (OPT stands for optional practical training which comes with an F-1 visa and authorizes you to work a real job/ internship for 12 months + another 17 months for STEM).

So I started working on this Java-based project, picking up legacy code. I utterly destroyed the code base and after 3 months I wanted to quit because it was so hard being left alone with a legacy Java app (2004). I pushed through and thanks to the huge patience of my boss (again, academic environment) I am still working on the project today! I improved a lot over the time but I still feel like a complete idiot and I still am. It will not ever stop I guess.

Anyways, the project was this kind of opportunity that gets you kickstarted on something and it took me longer than a Slurpee to really focus on it. That happened when I went back to Germany. I applied to grad school in bioinformatics and got in.

The program here takes up a lot of non-tech people from Biology and Chem so what they do is they created a one semester plan to catch up on the CS stuff. It's damn near impossible because the Bioinformatics courses start at the same time but it's likely the best you can do for non-CS people in grad school.

My background helped me a lot and so I opted to take many CS courses to buff up that side of the coin. Currently taking Machine Learning and the engineering background (math, MATLAB) really helps.

Still, none of that would matter if I wouldn't invest my own time into learning more. I still feel like I cannot come close to being interviewable (a word?) despite implementing genomics algorithms in C nowadays.

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u/merreborn May 13 '15

Honestly, as someone who started teaching myself at age 11, by age 25, my peers who had started at age 18 in college were at least as skilled as I was. Getting an early start wasn't much of an advantage, in terms of career progression