| > Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first? Worked in sales at a software / hardware company in the HVAC industry. Our software platform had a really easy way to customize the business logic in java. I started building utilities / scripts in java and worked my way into software engineering from there. > What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more? I'm a software engineer working on a popular customer facing service at a FAANG. I do enjoy the work. > How did you break that first-job barrier? I went from sales to software engineer at my first company, moving from sales into custom customer solutions department. > What were you doing before this? Not much, the sales job was my first job out of college. I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree. > Any tips for the rest of us? You must be passionate about programming and seriously enjoy software development. You must respect senior engineers and learn from them as mentors. You must not be discouraged by the pedigrees of your peers (people with CS degrees), directly out of college, they may have a slight advantage, but after a few years, you will be on a completely level playing field. |