At Heart, I am a Software Engineer

We start our career most probably with Trainee and then, once confirmed, gets promoted to Associate Software Engineer or Software Engineer. Our primary job responsibilities include analyzing the requirement, designing and developing the solutions in terms of one or more applications. Until first year of our career, we enjoy our roles and responsibilities as a software engineer.

Somewhere after a year or so, we start discovering that one or more of our friend got promoted to something such as “Senior Software Engineer” or “System Analyst”. Hmm! Now that’s what starts disturbing us from the point of view of career progression. This is inspite of the fact that we haven’t yet realized the overall roles and responsibilities of what all a software engineer has to perform. So far so good.

Another year passes away. And then, all of a sudden, news reaches us about some of our friends joining a company which is paying very high salary for the same position of “Software Engineer”. Gosh! Now what to do. We get further disturbed and confused about the software industry. Our energy starts getting dissipated in these tensions and we no more remain focused on solving problems of our customers with innovative solutions.

By the way, many a software engineer do not get the point that the “requirements” are nothing but the specifications around a set of problem our customer is trying to solve. And, we as engineers are expected to come up with solutions that would solve the customer’s problem. Thus, we should focus on solution-ing rather than jumping to application design.

In three or four years, many of us start focusing on “higher designtaion” or “higher salary”. These may also be termed as “Worldly” things. Both of these tend to take us away from our purpose; the purpose of designing & developing innovative solution to solve our customer’s problem and in a way contributing to our society. Mind you, our customer’s problem may be based on set of business processes problem that they are trying to solve to serve their customer in a better manner.

Once our focus shifts to these worldly, materialistic things, we no more remain a software engineer in the true sense. This is where we start performing in a poor manner. This leads to all sort of issues with our day-to-day life including but not limited to increased frustation, stress, diseases, loss of happiness & peace etc.

Today, after 14 years of my experience in software industry, I am still very much hands-on and love to design & develop solution to solve my customer’s problem. By that, I take pride in saying that I am a software engineer at heart.