Lessons learned as an entry-level software engineer
Summary
If you asked me a year ago what a software engineer did, I would have said something along the lines of “solving problems through code.” It’s a simple answer that points to how the work we produce is evaluated. After plenty of time spent in office hours, I graduated in 2021 with a CS degree and accepted an offer to be an Associate Software Engineer here at Sprout Social. While there are some problems you can solve by reading documentation online, you can’t always find information that is relevant to the work that you’re doing—being able to ask others for guidance is crucial. There are a lot of other skills that I gained over my time in undergrad that I take for granted, like navigating the command line and understanding core programming concepts. It’s a common misconception that since most of the topics covered in undergrad are theoretical in nature, they won’t prepare you for software engineering careers.