LF: Members with Careers in Software Engineering/Computer Science related fields

[The BMW Guy]

Looking to find out what the day to day activities a career in software would be like.

I've exchanged PMs with a few members on here already, as well as gone to many career fairs and mentorship events.
More input would always be appreciated though.

Currently, I'm just starting software engineering at the UofC (2nd year). I like programming a lot but am still wondering what I would like to do exactly with programming.

If you have the time, feel free to post in this thread, PM me or if you'd like we can meet up for coffee and lunch (on me of course).

Hopefully it will help me figure out what I would want to do in the future.

Thank you in advance!

[V6-BoI]

I used to work in the software and firmware industry for a few years.

I think it depends on the type of company you join. When I was doing firmware development, the company was only a 4 man show including me, so there wasn't anything formal at all. All the projects we worked on were basically designed/developed scratch so there was a lot of room to program your way.

From what I hear from some of the bigger companies, you have to adapt the company's coding standard, and there are a lot of rules you have to follow. You'd have to go to code reviews, and basically go through every line of code that you write. I remember a friend telling me that his old company (not gonna point any names here), they basically had to maintain legacy code that's been around for years and there were a crap tonne of lines. It was written pretty crappy in the beginning, and since it's too much work to redo it. Everyone who needs to develop on it, just adds to it so it continually gets crappier.

Hope this helps.

[ganesh]

I am in SW industry. Started working in SW 16 Yrs ago, currently work as a BA so not in to programming lately. If you are intrested send me a PM and I am happy to answer any questions.

[.jl-]

Like what V6-Boi said, it depends on what company you join. I graduated out of SAIT last year and am currently working on a oil and gas production accounting system. My roles are usually working on bugs, writing tests/scenarios and I do a lot of paired programming with the seniors when developing new features.

[supe]

I have a degree in com sci, graduated in 2006. Been in the industry since.

Day to day activities really depends on whether you're with a large or small company. V6 boi definitely captures what I hear from working in the bigger companies. In a smaller one you definitly need self drive since you won't always have the resources and industry advice you may want.

In the end its really what you want. I would say the standard of whether you really enjoy programming is whether you would actually program in your own time. The coolest thing to me about software development is creating something out of nothing that actually has value to people.

[Super_Geo]

If you like stocks/commodities/etc, are good at math, and have strong programming skills you can try to get in at an investment bank or a hedge fund on the algo trading side.

They do some pretty interesting shit... haha I have no idea what, exactly, and I sit next to three of them.

[AG_Styles]

Majoring/Majored in CPSC at the UofC. Working as a designer making video games, obviously not in Calgary.

Really depends on what you want.

Big game companies don't care about your ideas. They just care about profit and making you do as much as you can, for as little as possible while raising profit expectations. You need to make friends with people at the top in order to do anything. As a newbie, i'd start here as you don't know how to professionally make proper games until you've been through the crunch.

In smaller companies, you get a lot of control over what you do, but you will be more worried about when your next paycheck is going to come in. Recommended more for experienced vets of the industry.

I get a lot of people back in Calgary asking me how they'd be able to get a job like mine. All i can say is, know how to program, know how to design/draw/ and animate computer graphics, make your own game, make sure it's fun, and hope to god a company decides to take a chance on you. Oh, prepare for unpaid OT, and 12-16 hour work days including weekends. Officially, OT is never forced on you, you just have to put in your own time in order to meet insane deadlines to get your next paycheck.

In short, it's a rough industry that requires a lot of work before you can get in. And when you are in, it still requires a lot of sacrifice and work. Unless you are one of those entitled business/marketing ppl, then you think video games make themselves within a day.

the good side is that i can say that i get to play video games at work and surf the net all day for research. If you get into a decent company/studio, you'd be up for some nice monetary bonuses based on how well your game sells (cough... call of duty...)

On that, I'm surprised you went straight into software eng/programming without knowing what you really wanted to do from the start.

[M.alex]

Originally posted by Super_Geo
If you like stocks/commodities/etc, are good at math, and have strong programming skills you can try to get in at an investment bank or a hedge fund on the algo trading side.

They do some pretty interesting shit... haha I have no idea what, exactly, and I sit next to three of them.

Which one? There's not much quant stuff locally, at least that I ever found

[M.alex]

Originally posted by V6-BoI
I used to work in the software and firmware industry for a few years.

I think it depends on the type of company you join. When I was doing firmware development, the company was only a 4 man show including me, so there wasn't anything formal at all. All the projects we worked on were basically designed/developed scratch so there was a lot of room to program your way.

From what I hear from some of the bigger companies, you have to adapt the company's coding standard, and there are a lot of rules you have to follow. You'd have to go to code reviews, and basically go through every line of code that you write. I remember a friend telling me that his old company (not gonna point any names here), they basically had to maintain legacy code that's been around for years and there were a crap tonne of lines. It was written pretty crappy in the beginning, and since it's too much work to redo it. Everyone who needs to develop on it, just adds to it so it continually gets crappier.

Hope this helps.

I know that feeling all too well!

Currently company I'm working for insist on doing all their mathematical models in Excel (sloooooooooow) instead of some OO language.

Also, this was a first for me - apparently people believe Excel is a database, and we have (had) 500+mb Excel files! I've never seen an Excel file take 10minutes to open, haha!

[.jl-]

Originally posted by M.alex


I know that feeling all too well!

Currently company I'm working for insist on doing all their mathematical models in Excel (sloooooooooow) instead of some OO language.

Also, this was a first for me - apparently people believe Excel is a database, and we have (had) 500+mb Excel files! I've never seen an Excel file take 10minutes to open, haha!

you'd be surprised in how many companies use excel as their database

[Mar]

Originally posted by .jl-


you'd be surprised in how many companies use excel as their database

I just built a replacement for a company, they were using it to do all their ordering/quoting and cost management. It was a nightmare, it took me a week just to figure out how it worked and now they've gotten rid of it for the new software I built.

I got a computer science degree on 2004, got my first programming job in 2006. The stuff posted above is pretty bang on, I've been to many a code review and had to deal with a lot of legacy code when I was in the oil and gas industry doing seismic data management software. Doing a complete code rewrite just isn't in the budget and a lot of the companies using your software simply want a patch added, they don't care how the code looks.

You can also go contracting around the USA, they're dying for people there. I did it for a year in Atlanta and New York but it wasn't my thing, I still have people email me weekly with contract offers to try and get me back down there. That's an easy job for you though.

Otherwise if you can discover a way to increase a company's productivity by developing a software solution for them, it's pretty easy to sell something like that in Calgary, this is what I did when I decided to split off and start my company. First it was all web pages, now in a couple weeks I have to go to Houston to meet a guy about an iPhone application. The sky's the limit if you can find out what it is people need and convince them it'll pay for itself.

[.jl-]

I also know a lot of freelance programmers who select jobs from freelancing sites

[Super_Geo]

Companies use Excel and VBA because they're accessible to end-users who have very basic programming skills and are computer savvy.

I trade options and have some seriously robust excel front end pricing models that have been put together with a shitload of VBA (there's a lot of back-end work done server-side, which easily plugs into Excel). This was built by the quants group in Toronto, but if something breaks in the middle of the trading day, I can usually figure out what's wrong and fix it myself or figure out a work-around, as there is no chance that they would be available to fix it on the spot.

If they programmed it in assembly I'm sure it'd run one hell of a lot faster, but if something breaks in the middle of the day, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?

Before this job I had no idea how much you could do in Excel... most underrated piece of software around.

[V6-BoI]

Originally posted by Super_Geo

If they programmed it in assembly I'm sure it'd run one hell of a lot faster, but if something breaks in the middle of the day, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?

Move the program pointer back to address 0x00000000?

[Super_Geo]

Originally posted by V6-BoI


Move the program pointer back to address 0x00000000?

... absolutely no idea what you just said.

[AG_Styles]

Originally posted by V6-BoI


Move the program pointer back to address 0x00000000?

haahhahahaha, experience eh Randy? lol

[M.alex]

Originally posted by Super_Geo
Companies use Excel and VBA because they're accessible to end-users who have very basic programming skills and are computer savvy.

I trade options and have some seriously robust excel front end pricing models that have been put together with a shitload of VBA (there's a lot of back-end work done server-side, which easily plugs into Excel). This was built by the quants group in Toronto, but if something breaks in the middle of the trading day, I can usually figure out what's wrong and fix it myself or figure out a work-around, as there is no chance that they would be available to fix it on the spot.

If they programmed it in assembly I'm sure it'd run one hell of a lot faster, but if something breaks in the middle of the day, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?

Before this job I had no idea how much you could do in Excel... most underrated piece of software around.

1 - who the heck programs in assembly?

2 - You can definitely do a lot in Excel, but I don't think you should be using it to store gigs of information as a database.

[The BMW Guy]

Thanks for the replies and PMs!
Has got me a little more insight as to what the industry is like.

Any more comments, please feel free to share. I enjoy reading about what people do and how they got there.

[DRKM]

Originally posted by M.alex


1 - who the heck programs in assembly?

2 - You can definitely do a lot in Excel, but I don't think you should be using it to store gigs of information as a database.

You would be surprised how much Firmware still gets programmed in Assembly. They don't realize that compilers today are 100000x better then what they used to be.

The old eastern Europeans love it. I mean LOVE it.

I find some of the older guys like BASIC as well.

What is neat is that firmware is getting programmed in C++ now.

[Thomas Gabriel]

Originally posted by Super_Geo
Before this job I had no idea how much you could do in Excel... most underrated piece of software around.

Yeah it's pretty badass. I'm a C# developer but lately I've been doing a lot of VBA stuff and the development time for an Excel solution is way less than it would be to make your own solution with C#. The speed isn't horrible either. The only thing I don't like is the oldschool IDE.

But yeah, anything over 20mb in Excel is a pig. In the past I've used MatLab to process that amount of data and then brought the results back into Excel.