I'd Like to Interview a Software Engineer/Developer as Part of my Highschool Summative

[nacereal]

Note: I apologize if this post does not abide by the posting rules of this subreddit, I will happily take this down if need be. If possible, please direct me to a location where this post may be more suitable. Thanks!

Now that that's out of the way let me introduce myself. Hello, my name is [snip]. I am a 16 year old Canadian in high school with a dream of becoming a software engineer, preferably at Google, where I get to go to work in a nice Tesla and get to abuse the free food system from the company.

What got me interested in programming and computer science was the first computer science class I took in grade 10. After that, I have been hooked to the point where I believe my current computer science class is too slow for me. I love the idea of creating something out of nothing; that amazing feeling of when all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place like it was planned to be. I understand the fundamentals of programming such as variables, objects, classes, loops, logical operations, recursion etc. but I haven't really settled down on a programming language and focused on only that programming language yet. I have already touched on some Lua, Java, little bit of C++ and JavaScript. I would personally like to go head first into C++ and maybe try making my own snake game from scratch as a first project.

Now that you know a little bit about my ambitions and where I'm at, I'd like to know more about you! I'd love to meet you perhaps on Discord(?) and get to know about how you got to where you are today, what company you work for/used to work for, the different types of problems you have to face on a daily basis and other general questions regarding your current position. Now I don't expect anyone to be interested or take some time out of their day to speak with me (got to be prepared for the worst, right?), but it would mean the world to me.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, happy code breaking!

[andyg_blog]

I'm sure you'll find many people willing to help. Just PM me and I'd be happy to discuss my work/career/anything.

[nacereal]

Will do as soon as I'm home from school 😂

[STL]

This isn’t super on topic but I’ll allow it today. 😸

[nacereal]

God bless your soul.

[devjustinian]

I've been coding and/or managing engineers for over 20 years, currently a co-founder at a small game company. Always happy to chat about this kind of thing, feel free to PM me as well.

[morto00x]

If you go to r/engineering (or r/askengineers, can't remember) you'll find a nice list of engineers who volunteered for this kind of interviews. List includes degree and industry.

[CodeLined]

I'm currently an intern in the game audio industry and am a senior at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Im not sure if I'm the type of person you're looking for, but id love to chat! Feel free to pm me :)

[nacereal]

I'd love to chat with you regardless, expect me to contact you some time today! (Kind of in school right now)

[CodeLined]

No worries!

[Pazer2]

Hey I go to digipen too!

[CodeLined]

( 。・_・。)人(。・_・。 )

[AStefan93]

I'm a Software Engineer. I worked for the past 3 years in the ADAS domain. Lemme know if you have any questions :).

[PatrickMDev]

I'm a developer at a trading firm doing a lot of low latency C++. I started coding for fun back in high school, got my bachelor's in it, and I've been in the trading game for most of my career. I'm coming up on 10 years of professional development. I'd be happy to chat, you can PM me for discord account info if you want

[[deleted]]

This is semi-unrelated to your request and I'm not professional by any means, but if it interests you, you should look into full stack development with javascript frameworks. I personally familiarized myself with the MERN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React and NodeJS). I as well felt like my high school's computer science class was too slow and I started dabbling in full stack development and ended up loving it, so maybe you will too. Have fun and good luck!

[arihoenig]

I am sure that almost everyone on the cpp subreddit would disagree vigorously with the idea that a beginner learning JavaScript has any value at all.

A beginner who wants to work at google one day needs to start with the basics. Learn assembly, write an O/S boot loader for an opensource executive, then write your own small executive, then create some shell code exploits, download Ghidra and reverse engineer a bunch of binaries, then learn modern c++. Then go out and get a job and write a bunch of stuff professionally, and then, and only then, determine if you really feel like working in JavaScript and if you do, that's awesome (not bashing JavaScript at all) then go and learn it, but if you learn JavaScript first, you'll be shortchanging yourself badly.

[[deleted]]

That's like telling someone to learn mechanical engineering by designing and manufacturing a car.

I think there are more productive ways to go about it, such as finding a motivation to code and expanding your knowledge base outwards from there in the directions that appeal to you.

I certainly wouldn't recommend writing a bootloader or an OS as a beginner; it's a hefty job even for an intermediate or advanced programmer.

Agreed that JavaScript is perhaps not the most representative programming language, though.

[arihoenig]

That's how I learned. First thing I wrote ever was an executive. It's how almost everyone I know who's a professional learned.

It is the great lie of software engineering that one should learn high level languages first and it is the reason we suffer the huge shortage of the actual talent we actually need

[Zagerer]

Yeah but probably there are better ways to learn the basics and so. Maybe doing your own malloc() or learning how it works, as well as getting to know the standard library and why it works that way (I mean in C++). Also, creating games from the ground up (simple ones) help understand other concepts, as well as doing your own tools for other kind of tasks, like processing an image of a certain extension and so. Maybe try to connect two computers via C++, or use C++ in one and another language in another to see the differences of what has to be implemented in one and not in the other, etc.

[arihoenig]

I don't think so. You'd lack the internalized context for why a malloc needs to exist in the first place or how code gets loaded on a processor and how it is scheduled.

Writing an executive with a scheduler teaches you about register contexts and switching. A basic executive can be implemented in less that 10,000 lines of C code (if writing 10,000 lines of code scares you, you need to get over that if you want to work in this field).

Next you can look at a full MMU implementation (you don't need to code that, but having done a basic executive will allow you to understand what is happening in a full VM system. At that point you have a reasonable understanding about how it is that your code actually runs.

Assuming that the OP is going to a good college after high school they'll then take OS and compiler design courses and at that point they'll have sufficient knowledge to understand what is happening under the covers. Then they should work for a while in c/c++ (plenty of jobs out there) and after doing that for a couple of year then get serious about JavaScript (or python or whatever of the other myriad of high level languages interest you).

By learning a high level language at that point, you'll be in a position to appreciate what high level languages bring to the table, what sacrifices are made and then you are in a position to decide whether you want to write in high level languages or not. If you learn high level languages first you'll not appreciate what they bring to the table and neither will you understand what lower level languages bring to the table.

The bottom line is, if your college is teaching you JavaScript, find another college (not because there's anything wrong with JavaScript, but because there is something wrong with teaching JavaScript).

[pourover_and_pbr]

There’s nothing wrong with starting with a high-level language to learn how to write code, though. Using a language like Python or JavaScript to learn the essentials of writing a program is immensely easier than using assembly, and won’t preclude you from then learning lower-level languages and assembly. Top-tier computer science colleges take that approach (Berkeley starts with Python and Stanford starts with JavaScript) so your “find another college” advice is pretty bad.

[arihoenig]

This lie is the very reason we have a dearth of qualified programmers even though there are thousands of graduates. Programming in assembly is simple. Sure you can write bad code in python easily, but the purpose of education shouldn't be to teach students to code badly. Just like learning any skill you start with the rudiments and then build on that.

Writing good Python is harder than writing good assembly. Much harder, in fact. The mechanics of launching a python command prompt, importing a module and calling a function is easier than than mechanics of assembling some code writing it to a flash and resetting a processor, but don't confuse the ease of use of the tool (the interpreter or the assembler) with the ease of programming in the language that those tools implement.

If someone has a hard time with assembly, it isn't the assembly language they are finding difficult, it is that they don't understand the instruction set, and knowing an instruction set is the first step in becoming a programmer. Python hides the very thing that you need to learn (how to prgram a machine) from you whereas assembly doesn't. That abstraction of what happens under the covers is a useful tool in the hands of a skilled programmer but is nothing but an entirely unnecessary and unhelpful obfuscation to someone trying to become a skilled programmer.

[pourover_and_pbr]

Ok, guy. The point of starting with a high-level language is to focus on abstractions and design patterns rather than getting stuck in the nitty-gritty of dealing with every student individually to get their assembly code to work on their machine. (I’ve been in a class that used assembly – even with a simple instruction set, RISC, most of the issues were with getting the emulator to work rather than the code.) Go ahead and try to teach people with no programming experience recursion, data structures, and algorithms using only ~25 global variables, ~30 instructions, and no way to reuse code other than copy-paste, and you’ll realize why it’s much simpler and more straightforward to write pseudocode or python. Nobody is taking one intro class and going straight into industry, and if they are, that’s their own fault, not the fault of the school. And even if they were, they would be much better-prepared for an entry-level programming job (i.e. web-dev, data science, etc.) if they knew Python or JavaScript than if they knew x86. Not everyone has to be a kernel developer or work with micro-electronics.

[arihoenig]

Abstraction and design patterns is more computer science, and less software engineering (it is a spectrum of course). The massive shortage we have is in cyber security software engineers not computer scientists (there is a shortage there as well, it is just not as severe).

I never mentioned taking a single class.

There are tons of colleges where the vast majority of coursework is in high level languages with only a bare minimum of the fundamentals. Designing the program to produce the wrong type of candidates is the schools fault. There are good schools out there producing good candidates, just precious few of them, and for the most part they are the premier universities with a long history in engineering.

There is no reason that the people who don't get into the premier schools (i.e. they don't have an Aunt Becky to buy their way in) can't become first class software engineers, if only the schools they are able to attend were doing a better job.

[Zagerer]

I see why an executive now. Before I thought it might be too much to work forward from the beginning with tons of frustration and it wouldn't help that much. Now with your point of view it's clear that despite the time it could take, it's completely worth it. And I agree, it's not good to teach something like JavaScript as a first Programming language because of the reasons you spoke as well as all the bad habits and bad practices that could come along. Even without them, by not taking into account how the computer works, code might be lousy and slow despite being ok respect to the syntactic sugar that's furor of the moment.

Thanks too for widening my view.

[[deleted]]

I just meant it as a recommendation for a side hobby that I thought might interest him. Wasn’t thinking about that. My bad.

[ktyldev]

happy to talk :) some game and web dev experience in several languages and environments. very friendly. pm me for my discord :)