someone asks me : What do people not tell you about being a software engineer?

So the thing is , No one actually knows what they’re talking about.

See, the thing about building software is that usually you are inventing something.

Not in a pretentious way. I don’t mean “inventing something” as in inventing the light bulb, but I mean making something new that someone else hasn’t built before (well, hopefully — if you’re building something someone else already built, then you might be doing it wrong).

Because of this, people are usually just coming up with solutions based on what they think will work.

And that’s about the best you can do. Sure, the more experience you have, the more you can recognize certain patterns, or lay certain architectural foundations, but you’re mostly just coming up with something new. Maybe not 100% new, maybe some sort of slightly different thing than another thing that exists, but it’s still new.

So yeah, no one knows what they’re talking about. You’ll sit in meetings, with people talking about all kinds of smart-sounding stuff. Most people are trying their best to understand and play catch-up. No one wants to be the dumb one. People try to make it a science as much as possible, but if you really wanna be honest, people are just trying stuff and seeing if it works.

It’s not a bad thing. That’s just the nature of software development.