A good story of how they dropped a production database. It’s a lesson that is expensive to learn, and will not be repeated. I’d always hire engineers who have dropped a production db elsewhere, rather than risking them dropping it on my current project.
- Designing and launching a critical, high availability/throughout system. Finding out that it fails to scale in some way you never anticipated. Designing last minute patches and workarounds to prevent the doomsday situation or patches that will mitigate the issue, quietly in the background
- Being in crunch mode and just when you think all bases are covered, finding that one problem that will create a buggy end user experience. Now trying to convince directors or some VP to let you or your team patch it, explaining the risk of doing it vs not doing it, working around the red tape and political non sense
- Taking down a production service or database. Bonus points if you’re more of a dependency for several other critical systems, and so your wide blast radius takes every one else down with you
- Completing a large scale, data migration, while the system is running in production. Bonus points if you do it without an outage or data loss. Extra bonus points if you do cause an outage, and some VP is impacted and sends an escalation email, and now your senior staff engineers, directors, and program management are all shitting their pants on a Saturday and trying to come up with a measured response to the email, what they’re doing to mitigate it now, and what the long term plan will be.
- Getting criticism and dealing with criticism professionally and calmly, without lashing out, when you get thrown under the bus for a failure, even though you escalated and made it visible a long while ago, and leadership didn’t give a shit
- learning how to deal with shitty people who steal your ideas and present as their own, or cheat you in some other way (not compensating you properly for you contributions), without losing your cool or letting it impact your physical or mental health
It may seems soppy, but comments about user satisfaction
I did some tasks in companies and for personal projects, and I liked the positive impact it had for some people
They were just satisfied with it. You knew you could create value. And by value, I mean not just money, but something that had a positive impact on their personal lives or work/life balance.
At best, you could even involve them, so that they learn from the experience, and do a part of the work themselves.
Being a (software) engineer can be very uplifting in some environments
I have a couple of software patents (way to interrupt running optimised code, way to insert code dynamically into running optimised code) but I list them pretty close to the bottom of my portfolio because some people seriously don't like it and see them as a massive negative.
Or maybe that's what you meant by 'equivalent to a masters degree' lol?
I work in product now and all my peers have masters degrees (minus me) but the patent (while not necessarily useful) seems to have put me on equal footing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award