Industry Professional Interview Reflection - Software Engineering Manager

Note: My industry professional contact preferred to stay anonymous for this blog post, but I have provided his information in my private Canvas submission for verification. 

        My industry contact is an Engineering Manager for a healthcare software company where he oversees a team of software engineers that create data solutions for the healthcare technology sector. When I mentioned that I was in school for Computer Science with a concentration in Software Engineering, my coworker who is married to this industry professional put me in contact online. After connecting on LinkedIn and quickly glancing through their various SWE and management roles, I knew I had found an invaluable interview subject who would not only answer my questions but additionally provide questions I wouldn't know to think of as well as new perspectives from within the industry. While I did ultimately ask all of the suggested questions, the natural conversation led to a few more questions regarding approaches to learning in order to prepare for work as well as the type of non-software initiative taken in the workspace that leads to new opportunities.

        A big emphasis early on in my industry contact's recounting of his professional history was the mindset of being helpful and willingly taking on challenges when presented with them. My contact credited volunteering himself into work opportunities as a chief method for getting noticed and making an impact with his efforts beyond simply having technical knowledge of the subject matter. On the note of technical knowledge, my contact was kind enough to discuss what has served him and what he looks for in potential hires and types of skills that make someone universally successful as a software engineer. Firstly, there is no particular concentration on languages as a mid-level engineer or higher is expected to learn and adapt to whichever particular language is applicable to a work project. My contact mentioned the need to understand the core principles of code structure as well as a "domain" or area of focus that informs the ability to approach code and problems with nuanced analysis and troubleshooting respective to that domain, for instance databases or networks. 

        Beginning with "key takeaways", this interview did continue in canonizing the looming idea that entry-level and junior level engineering roles are highly troubled as this manager is not currently looking for that level of experience nor is hiring them common in the circles he navigates professionally. While this is frustrating, it is not much better for many fields and there are at least strategies and options within the Software Engineering world that provide hope for a future career. My contact suggested a few strategies including getting comfortable with LeetCode challenges, understanding/reading up on Linux, picking a language to dig deep into in order to understand coding as a practice, picking a domain to specialize in/begin researching, contributing to open-source projects, and learning about the software development lifecycle from end to end.  

        This interview has reassured me that anticipating some ancillary approaches to learning how to work in this industry will be an imperative, there is an "entry-level" prefix hurdle in this career role that needs to be jumped through hand-carved knowledge, collaborative projects, and certain abstract skills that can't be explicitly nailed down. I am walking away from this conversation with a renewed fire for picking up computer science literature and to continue the practice of specializing and picking a field within a field that I would like to enter in the greater software engineering industry.