3 Things Nobody Tells You About Being A Software Engineer

Being a software engineer is both fun and empowering. It's also fascinating. Those are facts 😊 Notwithstanding, there are three dark sides to the field that you do not hear much about.

Numero uno #1

For most of your career as a software engineer, you will be doing a ton of work in legacy code bases. What do I mean by "legacy codebases"?

You will hardly be writing code from scratch unless you decide to work for a startup that is just getting started with building its product.  This means that you will need to have a pretty deep and decent understanding of whatever technologies you are going to be working with in order to get the existing codebase back to new and functional. Imagine having poor knowledge of React for example and having to refactor a 3yr old legacy codebase. Yh. it's going to be a mad ride for you 😂

The silver lining though is, you become exponentially better at that technology just by sifting through all the weeds, and that counts toward your industry experience points.

#2 of what nobody tells you about becoming a software engineer

Tension headaches can easily become your best buddies. Oh my God! At some point, you won't go a single day without feeling like your head is being bashed in. Mostly because of a couple of reasons:

1. The job is extremely mentally tasking. You are always in some sort of analytical and brainstorming mode. Even while you are away from your workstation. It is super easy to still take work away with you mentally. So this leaves no room for genuine rest.  I'll probably talk about the health of developers in a separate post.
2. The software engineering role by default promotes an unhealthy lifestyle. It makes you live a very sedentary life. Sitting for long hours, not giving thought to the quality of meals, lots of screen time, and almost no exercise, movement, and activity. Yep. This leaves you prone to various health complications that show up as constant headaches.

You don't hear people talk about this too much.

Number #3 Unrealistic expectations and bosses

Working with unrealistic expectations of both clients and bosses is a right of passage to being a great software engineer 😀  

"Need the 10-page website developed in two weeks with optimized content already done"

"Let's get the user dashboard with the 1000 charts and features together by end of the month"

Yh. Right.  Dare I say more? At some point though, you will have to find a way to handle this professionally to save your mental space.

In ending

Hey, you made it this far. I'm glad that I could share these with you. Keep them in mind. If you happen, to encounter them some time on your journey, remember that you are not alone.

Maybe, we can talk about it over a big bowl of fufu 😉