Explaining to My Son: What Does a Software Engineer Do? What is it like to be a Software Engineer

My son was curious and asked me: "Dad, what do you do as a software engineer?"

I was at that time in the car with him, and working on a laptop, as I still had some work to finish on Friday afternoon. I had a Pull Request (PR) open for 2 months, and it was a big one. I was working on a new feature, and had to investigate and fix some challenging problems. Anyway, on the Friday, I finally got two approvals! and just had to push some minor fixes according to the comments from the peers.

Pushing the final commits on that PR, waiting for Pipeline (Azure DevOps) to run some (integration) tests. It took about 40 minutes for a complete pipeline run. And I was keeping my fingers crossed for the last few minutes when the remaining checks were to be done. Finally, with the last green tick/check, the Pull Request was merged because of Auto Complete policy met: At least one approval, and all tests are passing (Unit Tests, Integration Tests), also some additional checks: Coverage, Guardian (a static code analyzer) and a work item is linked.

It feels great to have the PR merged! And immediately, I got the Email Notifications: XXX Completed the Pull Requests...

As I closed the laptop, I said to my son, this is what is like to be a Software Engineer: Solving challenging problems.

Another great thing of being a software engineer: Work anywhere (not just WFH work from home), and not many meetings compared to those jobs involving people management...

[caption id="attachment_153190" align="alignnone" width="2048"] Showing the Kids the Pull Request and Explain to Him what does a software engineer do[/caption]

Here is what the ChatGPT says about the subject:

A software engineer is someone who designs and develops computer programs. They use programming languages to write the code that makes up a program, and then test, debug, and maintain it. Being a software engineer is like being a puzzle solver. Software engineers need to think logically to solve complex problems. They need to be creative in developing efficient solutions for their projects. It requires excellent communication skills in order to work with other people such as product managers, designers, and customers. It also requires strong technical skills in order to understand the fundamentals of programming languages and how computers work. Finally, software engineering requires dedication as it often involves long hours writing code to make sure everything works correctly before releasing a project.

--EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) --

Blog: Explaining to My Son: What Does a Software Engineer Do? What is it like to be a Software Engineer

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