Growing as a Software Engineer

So you got a cool Software Engineering job at a nice startup/fast growing company or one of the Fortune 500 companies; you’ve spent a while there and you are asking yourself, how can I measure my growth here? Have I been growing? How much have I grown in the time I have been here? Well, there are a couple of ways to check your growth as a Software Engineer and I will discuss some of them.

You can take on projects on your own: One of the things that marks out your growth as a software engineer is the fact that you can pick up a project and drive it from start to completion with little supervision-without being spoon fed along the way. Definitely, collaboration is really important, you will need to checkin with your teammates from time to time, asking questions, making sure you are all on the same page while you work on the task at hand. It could initially be very small projects but don’t be afraid to take them on, see to it that it is done very well so you can be trusted to take on larger projects. It’s okay to ask questions along the way, your enthusiasm to get the job done will be apparent to your colleagues and this will in turn make you grow as an engineer. Taking ownership of projects, marks out your growth as a software engineer.

You don’t go Gung-ho when given a task: So this is very important, imagine, you are given a task of adding a feature or to start building some new components of a new application your team is working on, and immediately you seat by your computer to begin, you excitedly start coding right away using the first idea that comes to mind without thinking through the problem again and going through any design loopholes you might have from the ideas you have concocted. This will eventually hurt you in the long run when you realize that your initial design had certain flaws; which will then lead to endless refactoring and the inability to scale that feature and also make it difficult for other engineers on your team to re-use or add to what you have done already. One of the characteristics of a more matured software engineer is the ability to think through a problem, carefully considering the use-cases and also looking for loopholes in his design. He keeps altering that design looking for ways to make it better and for it to be re-usable if needed. For example: while building that component, he will ask himself, should this component be its own microservice? Does it serve its own purpose or should it be separated from the entire product itself? Maybe making this decision will make it easier for the team to scale just that microservice in future if needed without having to rewrite various portions of the whole product itself just to modify that component.

You think more in hindsight: Another good sign of good progress as a software engineer is the fact that he is able to think in hindsight. What does that mean you say? Well imagine you start out building a product, but asides thinking about how you will design it or how awesome that product is going to be from your perspective, you begin looking at the whole project from your customer’s perspective. Asking yourself, how will my users relate with this product, what are their needs; how will this component I am adding make their lives better. This way, you become more involved in team meetings, you are able to make more deeply thought contributions since you are beginning to think more about the customer and how that product will succeed.

Your don’t think from an Engineering point of view alone: So what do I mean here? As an engineer working at a company, even though you work on building and maintaining applications, you shouldn’t just think of that alone, begin to think about how much what you are doing can impact the business both positively and negatively. If you build the application well, it will definitely impact the company positively but if it is built and designed poorly, it will impact the organization negatively. Look for ways to make your company more profitable. Research on the competition, find out what products they have released and how you can get ahead of that, how can you be of value to your company by helping them stay ahead of the competition. This will definitely make your company profitable and also show that you care about the company’s aspirations on driving their growth into the next frontier.

In conclusion, I will say there are many more characteristics that show your growth as a software engineer but these are some major ones which will definitely mark you out in the software space as a valuable engineer to your company.

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