Interview with a Software Engineer

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I have been a software engineer for 22 years. I started out as the only software engineer in a small family-owned food wholesaling company then moved on to work for a defense contractor. Currently I am a Level 3 software engineer in the healthcare industry, where I have worked for the past 22 years. I design, test, and implement changes to existing software applications.

Overall, my job satisfaction is about an eight on a scale of one to ten. However, the job isn’t perfect. If everything was ideal, I would be able to complete coding projects without the intense time pressures placed on me by clients. The unique nature of this career path has become one of buy-outs and outsourcing. Twice in my career I have transitioned to a different company because the company I was working for outsourced its work. I’ve also been an employee of a company that was bought by a different company. I would not have willingly changed jobs.

I fell in love with computer programming as a college student. I took a numerical methods class that used the FORTRAN language. As I was preparing to graduate, the university announced it would begin offering a major in computer science. By taking a couple of extra classes, I became a member of the first graduating class with a computer science major. I graduated with a double major in math and computer science.

There are several projects that I have worked on during my career of which I am especially proud. When I worked for the food wholesaler, I developed a software product for industrial clients such as hospital kitchens. The software was a tool that allowed the clients to customize recipes for the number of servings needed.

I worked for the defense contractor during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. I was a member of a team that developed and installed parts logistics software which helped supply needed equipment to the military deployed in Kuwait.

By 1997 I had moved into the healthcare industry. At that time I played an important role in helping my company prepare for Y2K. I helped my team identify the types of operations that pertained to dates that could cause problems and would need to be changed.

There are some lessons I have learned throughout my career that weren’t taught in school. For example, I believe I stayed in my first job too long. I should have moved on to another job after five years instead of remaining there for a decade. I also was not a self-promoter early in my career. I was reluctant to take a stand when an idea I had developed was instead claimed by a coworker. The coworker received a promotion that should have been mine. One of the most important lessons I have learned during my career is that it’s essential that I please my manager. Not doing this in one job ultimately resulted in my lay-off.

Software engineering is a relatively straight-forward job, but it does have its quirks. Almost every software engineer has learned from experience that an industry axiom is true. A software engineer can never find the last bug in a program. This once happened to me when a program I had designed suddenly stopped working one day after three years with no problems at all. It took me several hours to discover that three separate circumstances that had never occurred together before caused the bug that halted the program.

The challenges I face as a software engineer are related mostly to my work with clients. I frequently struggle with trying to solve software issues without enough information to guide me. A client often doesn’t provide the information I need to identify the problem or the changes he wants. The balance between my work life and my personal life is good in my current job. However, when I first started working as a software engineer for the food wholesaler, I was the IT department. Whenever anything went wrong I was to the go-to guy. The company ran on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week schedule. I often had to fix problems at any time of the day or night. Consequently I missed a lot of days off and vacations.

The salary range for a Level 3 software engineer is approximately $60,000 to $70,000. Like many employees in this current economy, I’ve experienced salary reductions recently. I get five weeks of vacation each year based on the number of years I’ve been with my current company.

A software engineer must have a four-year college degree in computer programming and design. In addition to the technical training, I’ve developed interpersonal skills and have also worked to train and mentor other software engineers in my company. I also have learned how to translate a client’s business requirements into software solutions that can be coded into a product.

I tell friends that over the past decade, software engineering has become a commodity. Price drives the market for software development now, rather than quality of the product. As a result, software engineers aren’t considered specialists as they once were.

I would like to be working as a Developer 4 level software engineer in five years. If this were an ideal world, I would be running my own company. However, it would not be in the software engineering industry.