What makes a good software engineer?
Consider three engineers: Jim, John, and Jane.Jim comes to work at 11:30, and leaves at 4:30. He doesn’t care much about his job, so he writes just enough code to avoid getting fired. The code he does write is sloppily hacked together and poorly tested. He never writes documentation, because that would be too much effort. When he goes oncall, he ignores most alerts, because they’re probably not important anyway.John is very ambitious, and really wants to do a good job, so he can get promoted. In fact, he refuses to work on any project that won’t get him promoted, and tells his manager to give those projects to other teammates. When John gets assigned a task that won’t get him promoted, he usually ignores it, or gives it to someone else.John is fairly senior, so junior engineers often seek out his expertise. When someone asks John for help, he first evaluates how important the person is. If the person isn’t going to write him peer feedback, John is too busy to reply to their messages.Jane just graduated college, and hasn’t built a lot of software in the past. But she cares deeply about the quality of her work. Her code is impeccably tested, and flush with comments. She didn’t know what a move constructor was, or how to declare a variable “const,” but she quickly picked that up in her first few code reviews.Jane is happy to work on any project her manager assigns her. She figures if the manager gives her a project, that must be what’s best for the team. Sometimes Jane is given tasks that belong to other teams, and takes those tasks as seriously as her own engineering work (because other teams are doing important things too).When other engineers ask Jane questions, she sits with them for twenty or thirty minutes and helps them debug their issue, even if she doesn’t know the answer off the top of her head.Be Jane. Don’t be John or Jim.Being a good engineer is all about attitude.
T shirt design software?
Depending on what (how) you want to design... Photoshop is probably the best way to go. Of course, if you aren't just scanning in images to trace and implement into the canvas, get some type of vector graphics software to actually draw out the design----Adobe Illustrator -- Which will work perfectly with Adobe Photoshop. There isn't really a designated software for specifically "T-Shirt Design", but Illustrator and Photoshop are probably your best bet. Use Illustrator to design your own ideas and pictures. Photoshop to edit and finalize for production.
How can I prepare to become a software engineer?
How much math you'll need depends on what you end up working on- if you're doing game development or making an image editor, you'll need quite a bit of math. If you're working on a word processing program, not so much. You'll still want to take a lot of math classes, and any programming classes your school offers. If you want to get started programming, there are tons of free tools online you can use. I'd recommend starting with the Python programming language- it's fairly easy to learn, reasonably popular (Google uses it quite a bit), and there are tons of resources online. http://www.python.org You can also try other languages as well. If you're using a Mac, you can download Xcode, Apple's developer tools, for free (you need to register though). Microsoft has a free Express version of their Visual Studio. You can also download Java, which is used a lot for enterprise programming. Eclipse is an extremely powerful IDE used primarily for Java though you can download plugins to work with almost any other language. Personally, I'd suggest you start with a simple programming editor like Notepad++ (Windows), Kate (Linux), or TextMate (Mac) rather than a full-fledged IDE. You don't want to become dependent on the tools.
What makes you a good software developer?
The ability to model, in my head, complex systems.Other skills are important, but they all depend on or are related to my being able to picture an entire system in my head.Problem solving is critical, for instance. Visualizing how the entire system inter-operates is part of problem solving, though.Also, the ability to break down large tasks into smaller tasks. Again, though, the reason that I’m good at breaking down those tasks is because I can keep juggling all the layers in my head at once.Finally, the ability to work with others is also important. The phrase “strong opinions, weakly held” (which I first read on Coding Horror[1]) is a key way to think about it. Strong programmers will generally be smart people, but they also need to be self confident enough that, when they are presented with a better idea, they’d much rather throw out their own idea(s) and run with the new idea than stubbornly defending their inferior idea.The last one still has a peripheral connection to my initial point: Because I can model large blocks of software, I’m good at programming, and I’m self-confident in that ability. And because I’m self-confident, I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. So if I need to pivot to someone else’s idea? Great! I’m all about the best possible solution, not some ego battle to prove I’m smart.As a corollary, I’m always quick to accept blame for any problem where I had even the slightest involvement in the cause, and to give others credit where they had the slightest involvement in a solution. I don’t feel the need to prove anything, and I’m more interested in supporting my team members than promoting myself.Footnotes[1] Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
Becoming a software engineer in my 30's.?
Absolutely you can get into software engineering. It's a diverse field, though most people get into computer programming. What are you interested in--programming, database administration, testing, systems administration, business/systems analysis? Look at what is in high demand (job sites like Monster and Workopolis) in software. If you have a bachelors degree, you could easily up your chances of landing a good job if you were to get either a certificate in some area of software development (even something simple, like IT management), or a masters degree (several schools have simple software engineering masters degrees, as well as other computer science/information technology degrees). If you like the HTML/XML stuff, try to learn more about "Web 2.0". Yahoo and Google provide excellent APIs for rapid application development using simple scripting skills like javascript. Learn how to do mash-ups, work with AJAX, JSON, and REST. Another very important point: it is NOT mandatory for you to take courses to learn these skills; if you are capable of reading, experimenting, and learning on your own, you can become a good programmer without going through formal training. It depends partly on the kind of person you are. If you are one of those people that needs to hear an instructor and see someone show you things in person, then you will probably want to take courses. But if you are capable of reading articles on web sites and learning by code snippets and examples, you will do fine on your own. Another thing about programming: don't listen to people who insist that you need a four-year computer science degree--these people are typically dumbfounded at how many good programmers never got an CS or IT degree. Programming is more of a talent, and you have to have PASSION for it in order to excel at it.
Why do many electrical engineering graduates become software engineers? If they enjoy software engineering enough to make it their profession, why don’t they switch their majors to focus on it in the first place?
Being an electrical engineer,I think I'm quite eligible to serve the raw truth on your plate.I would only be talking about the general scenario in India. I don't know much about other countries.Electrical engineers becoming software engineers.Do you think this transition is out of choice? Out of interest? No. No. (Well there always exist some exceptions.)Approximately 4 lakhs electrical engineers graduate every year. May be more but not less.Job vacancies:-In core sector(govt.)- around 700–900 (includes all the PSUs)In core sector(non govt.)- may be around 5–6000( at Max.)This is just to give you a rough idea of the (demand/supply) ratio. Considering at Max. Vacnacies of even 10,000 the demand/supply ratio stands at 1/40.So what the remaining chunk of electrical engineers would do??At around 1 lakh people go for UPSC, Bank PO, SSC etc. What about the remaining ones??It's the tendency of maximum people to choose the easily available option i.e. campus placement offers in software companies. Since electrical engineers are also taught subjects like C+ and DBMS and also Data structure so they don't have much difficulty in shifting to coding and programming domain.So as you see,it’s more of necessity than choice and interest. Atleast the general scenario. However few are there who after studying electrical for few months realise their interest lies in coding or something else. This always happens when you choose one of the toughest discipline for engineering. :D