Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Life of a Software Engineer

Sorry, I didn't write anything the last few days as I was recovering from the weekend of moving. Anyways...

Works this week has been stressful. People are feeling panicked due to the customer changing their requirements. The part of the system I work on is in jeopardy as well as my job. I am not going to worry too much about it as it is totally out of my control.

So, what do I do? Well, I am a software engineer for a defense contractor. My job for the last ten year has been building map based software for estimating and displaying the effects of bad this. Chemicals and other nasty business that could kill people. I always tell people most of what I do was learned at an early age. Most of it is exactly the same things you learned with connect the dots and color by number. The only difference is the numbers are x and y coordinates on  map.

Why do I love my job? Well, my job and I have a love hate relationship. I often get stuck on hard problems that can take days or weeks to solve. These problems leave you utterly frustrated until you solve them. Solving one of these problems is probably the greatest drug ever. So, I guess you could call me a problem addict.

My personal belief is that the most important thing to being a software engineer is persistence. If you're not willing to put in the time and be frustrated constantly, you not going to make it.

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