Computer science has basically become a meme on this channel because it ranks so high as a major in many different categories but what about careers that you might go into with this degree like software engineering or software development and is this a valuable skill that you can learn that might lead you to start a company for instance in this.

Video we're going to go over what software engineering is and what a software engineer does on a daily basis and then we're going to talk about some of the most important factors you should consider when it comes to choosing this career we're going to go over things like job satisfaction job growth salary and other x factors that are really.

Important and i'm going to rank them from 1 to 10 and then i'm going to give you a final score on the career all right so first of all we're very briefly going to go over what is software engineering so according to google software engineering is an engineering approach on a software development of systematic application and a software.

Engineer is a person that applies the principles of software engineering to design develop maintain test and evaluate computer software and there are many different sub-specialties of software engineering and this could have anything to do from creating designing deploying and supporting software and the coding that goes into the software.

Itself is basically a set of instructions that tells a computer what to do now you can break it down even further than this when it comes to different subspecialties there is system software programming software and application software for instance and when you listen to personal accounts of what being a software engineer is like a.

Lot of the job actually does not include coding and many will say that a good amount of the coding is just you simply searching google or stack overflow in order to find an answer to a problem that you have now another thing i want to go over is the differences between a software engineer and a software developer and actually there's more.

Terms than even this right you've got coders you've got computer scientists you've got software engineers you've got software developers what are the differences here the truth is at some companies there are differences and in other companies they're basically the same thing it's just a title at the end of the day but generally speaking the.

Most prestigious one is going to be software engineer and in the companies where there is a difference between them i like to use the analogy of building a house so when you build a house you're going to have an architect that designs the house and that's kind of what the software engineer does when it comes to coding software then you're going to.

Have a contractor that goes about building the house and that's kind of what a software developer does they make decisions on how to solve problems in the process of building the house and then as a programmer you're the one who does the actual manual labor of building the house itself so you'd be laying down the foundation putting the walls in and.

In the case of the programmer you would be actually typing the code now realistically almost any job you'd be doing would be a mix of these now when it comes to the titles it is a little bit of a controversial subject some people are very opinionated on it but this seems to be the consensus the next part is how to become a software.

Engineer and this is another controversial subject now technically speaking when you look at data from the united states government careeronestop.org 86 percent of software engineers have at least a bachelor's degree 31 of them have a master's degree and four percent of them have a doctorate now just because they have a.

Bachelor's degree doesn't necessarily mean they have a bachelor's degree in computer science many of these people are career switchers so they might have gotten an english degree or something like that and then decided to switch into programming but with that being said the vast majority of people do have a college degree however you will see.

Many people especially influencers and youtubers tell you that you can either teach yourself or you can take a boot camp or get some sort of certification in order to break into this career and i totally agree that is possible so there are generally two different paths to get to your goal to get to where you want to be one of them is going to be a well.

Established path it's usually going to be nicely paved there's going to be stops along the way where you can go to the restroom or you can get some burgers or whatever you want now this path takes longer and it might also cost you more this is like getting a bachelor's in computer science getting an entry level job and working your way up this is the.

Route where you get a formal education the second path is the road less traveled instead of taking the well-paved road to get around to your destination which takes longer but it's also less bumpy you decide to take a shortcut through the dangerous jungle now this jungle is dense thick it's hard to even walk through it there's also.

Dangerous animals like snakes and tigers but if you're up for the challenge and you're willing to take on the risk this can get you to your destination a lot faster than taking the well paved road and it can also be a lot less expensive now the second path would be something like teaching yourself getting a certification or attending a boot camp.

And depending on your personality one of these paths is going to be better than the other one now for the average person i would argue that the college degree route is probably going to be the best statistically speaking but that doesn't necessarily mean that that route is the best for you so this is where you have to evaluate your current situation see.

What your strengths and your weaknesses are and figure out which one is best for you now again sometimes there is a difference between software engineering and software development but i am going to focus on software engineering in this video and the first thing we're going to evaluate is the job growth now bls lumps together software developers and.

Software engineers and they say that it's growing at about 22 which is much faster than average and there is 1.8 million jobs available in the us as of now on top of that you see that technology related occupations are expected to grow at 13 in the next 10 years and that is much faster than average the average is.

Something like 4 percent if you compare that to business careers they're growing at about 8 percent and business careers are still pretty good on top of this many new sub careers are emerging so for instance 10 years ago blockchain development was not a career but now that cryptocurrency is exploded and it's gone mainstream there is a growing need.

For blockchain developers and as technology gets better and better it takes over the market which inevitably will in my opinion there's just going to be more and more jobs available so for this one i'm going to give it a 9 out of 10 when it comes to job growth next on the list is going to be job satisfaction now careerexplorer.com has computer.

Programmers reporting about a 3.2 out of 5 star rating when it comes to job satisfaction which is the top 49 of careers so it's about average glassdoor.com has software engineer as the ninth best overall job with a job satisfaction rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars you do see much higher job satisfaction ratings when you work for a.
< br/>Fortune 500 company like google for instance they have a 4.5 out of 5 job satisfaction rating but google is known for spoiling their employees to an absolutely ridiculous degree i mean it's so ridiculous that they even made a movie about it now google would be one of the absolute best companies you could work for as a software engineer they are.

What's known as a fang company and that stands for facebook apple amazon netflix and google i guess it's mang now since facebook rebranded to meta so it's a main company but what about other fortune 500 companies that are outside of fang a lot of them do still treat their employees pretty well although it's not to the ridiculous extent of.

Google so for instance comcast is about a 4.1 out of 5 star rating that's pretty good and generally speaking the technology industry just has a ton of opportunity whether you're working in a technology related job or not a lot of the time it is a good idea for you to get a job in the tech industry there's just way more opportunity and that just.

Makes every single aspect of the job better whether it comes to salary your job satisfaction or any other number of things now when it comes to job satisfaction and meaning pay scale has software engineers with a meaning score of 29 which is not great and a satisfaction score of 57 which is above average now.

They define meaning as how much you think your job positively impacts the world so there are many software engineers that don't really think their job helps the world that much so they don't really think that their job positively impacts the world although they do have good job satisfaction so they probably get good benefits and they.

Get paid well and they tend to have a decent amount of fun at their job now almost opposite of this is health care related jobs just to give you a comparison a lot of the time when you look at health care related jobs the job satisfaction sometimes can be a little bit lower however the meaning is often times very high so a lot of health care.

Professionals are not super happy with their job especially during the pandemic they're kind of overworked over stressed etc however they do think that their job positively impacts the world so they do find it to be meaningful so overall we're seeing it kind of all over the board here but before you ever go into a job make sure you research it make sure.

You try it out make sure you actually enjoy what you're doing don't ever go into something just for the money that is a recipe for disaster money is important that is one thing you should think about but it's not the most important thing so i'm going to give this one an 8.5 out of 10 when it comes to job satisfaction next we're going to.

Be talking about salary and software engineering is a very well paid career so according to bls they make about a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year and technology related occupations in general make about ninety one thousand dollars a year which is much higher than the median annual wage for all occupations which is forty one 000 so.

You can see how ridiculously well paid information technology related careers are glassdoor has software engineers making a hundred and eight thousand dollars a year on average and just as a comparison with different job titles they have computer scientists making a hundred and six thousand dollars a year and software developers making ninety.

Seven thousand dollars a year and then they have programmers making eighty five thousand right so at a lot of companies it doesn't matter but at some companies it does and you do see a discrepancy in pay there now there's also a huge discrepancy in how much software engineers get paid depending on their specialty so for instance principal.

Software engineers on average get paid about 156 000 on glassdoor and software engineers that work at meta which used to be facebook get paid around 160 thousand dollars a year and you can get even more specific than that because there are huge variances in anything from your title rank specialty years of experience and location as well and you.

Can check on levels.fyi to see what you can expect to be paid at some of the bigger companies so for instance just one example i had here is you know at google if you're an l4 you have three years of experience and you've been with the company for three years and you live in seattle washington you can expect to make around 234 000 in total.

Compensation if you're at google living in san francisco you're an l5 you've been with the company for two years and you have 20 years of total experience you can expect to make like 639 000. so overall the pay is just ridiculously good here you have to give this one a 10 out of ten all right so next we're going to be talking about x factors and this.

Is basically things that don't fit under any other category but i still think are important so first of all i like to talk about how likely it is that your job might be automated and according to will robotstakemyjob.com there's about a four percent chance of automation which is very very low and this totally makes sense you're the one.

Who would be doing the automation you wouldn't be automated and if we ever get to the point where robots can do the job of a software engineer then either the robots are just going to totally take us over or nobody is going to have to work because we just have robots doing everything for us so is it easily automated absolutely not now the second.

Thing i like to talk about is is it easily outsourced this is where it gets a little bit interesting because there are very talented programmers who live in other parts of the world and up until very recently they would say there's no way that a programmer from poland for instance would be able to do virtual work like across the world and replace.

Someone from the us they would have to be in-house they would have to move to the united states in order to do that well things have changed a little bit since the pandemic they sent everybody on and now we found out that you can do like 90 95 of your job from the comfort of your home and this means that somebody from poland or india might be.

Able to do your job as well now there's still a lot of arguments on this right because there is a lot to be said about really understanding the language understanding the nuances of the culture and it is really difficult to work with somebody over zoom rather than just having them in your office so it is still kind of clunky but i do think.

There are a lot of jobs out there that still can be outsourced so that's definitely something to keep in mind in my opinion i believe that technology is a deflationary force i think it's a force that adds a lot of value to society and i do think even though there are lots of other talented programmers coming from other countries i think.

There's still going to be a lot of demand here in the us and in other parts of the world i mean let's be realistic businesses and the rest of the world are probably going to catch up with the us at some point now when it comes to skills how valuable are the actual skills that you're learning on the open market the zip recruiter skills index.

Literally has software engineering as the number one most valuable skill right so it is ranked 88 and to put that in perspective industrial sewing is ranked eight and you can see the top of the list is pretty much littered by technology related skills and this makes sense to me because coding development technology is one of the few ways where.

You can have basically infinite leverage a single person can create a website or an app or a piece of software that millions of people can use there are very few skills out there like this and that's why it's so easy to scale technology related companies and this is one of th
ose skills that's very flexible as well so let's say you're somebody who.

Wants a relatively chill desk job you can find that or maybe you want a remote job where you can travel the world while you're still getting paid you can find that as well or maybe you are very ambitious and you want to work your way up in a company you can find that as well or maybe you're extremely ambitious and you want to start your own business.

And change the world software engineering is probably one of the best skills you can learn to do that as well so this is one of those skills that has amazing flexibility on top of that technology is disrupting every industry out there so you can get hired as a software engineer in just about any industry that exists so for instance.

Let's say you are really passionate about video games you can get hired as a software engineer in the gaming industry or you really like cameras you can get hired as a software engineer for gopro or sony so there's many different types of software engineering specialties many different types of companies that need software engineers so if for whatever.

Reason you don't like your job it should be relatively easy for you to switch now one of the huge downsides in the technology industry is the problem of ageism this is where at a certain age companies start to basically get rid of people who are older and the reason they do that is because they think young people are better at rapidly adapting to.

A changing environment now to combat this software engineers usually do one of these three things one they specialize in something and they become world-class at it so for instance years ago i met this guy who was like a world-renowned database architect he was super super good at his job and not only did he have a normal job but he also.

Consulted on the side another thing they do is they move into a leadership role so instead of doing the coding yourself you can move into more of a management role where you oversee people who are doing the programming and then the third thing is they make their money young and then they get the heck out so i'm a huge fan of the fire movement which is.

Financial independence retire early and i've been following this subreddit for years and one thing i can say is the majority of people that are in this subreddit work in technology so when it comes to x factors this one is definitely going to be a 10 out of 10. alright so final score add them all up divide by four and you get 9.375.

Super super good career overall do not go into this career just because it pays well or because i say it's good make sure you always without fail do your own research make sure it's something that you're actually passionate about now some of the pros and cons here just to kind of summarize things amazing pay lots of opportunity very flexible those.

Are the pros cons here ageism rapidly changing environment i guess that could be a pro or a con but basically that means you have to learn and adapt really fast and then it can be very demanding because you have a very sought after skill set so they're gonna make you do you know a decent amount of work but with that being said if you.

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