Hello, I currently plan on going to college to become a software engineer. I am currently in the process of selecting a college to apply to, and the classes to take. I have a couple of questions I would like to ask to make some of my choices a little clearer.

Feel free to answer as few or as many of the questions as you want, and I'd love to hear any other advice you could give.


What college did you go to?
Would you recommend that college?
Would you recommend a different college?
Do you feel that the college curriculum properly prepared you?
What classes did you feel were missing?
What extra classes do you recommend taking?
What classes were most beneficial?
Class work load / Did you have spare time to work/code?

Current employer?
Job title (I don't know anything about the developer hierarchy)
What do you do in your current job?
Do you like your job? Why or why not?

Did you done any other work as a developer?
What did you do in those jobs?
Did you like those jobs?

How hard is the field to get into?
What skills do you recommend having? (such as knowing certain languages or being familiar with certain applications)
What does a new developer usually start out doing?
Should I consider moving to Silicon valley once out of college?

How hard is the field to get into?

Any thing else I should know?

Thank you very much for your help.

nosey aren't we?
are you sure you aint a spammer

well in england, firstly you really need a degree.
I had a colleague with 20 years experience at a large, well known
british telecoms company have trouble moving because he had no degree.
stupid, ridiculous? but true.

college courses are pretty rubbish really.
Just get on a course and get the little diploma that's all you need.
No one reads your code properly so there is no real incentive to become
an elegant coder, you get no appreciation of a nice bit of work it's ALL down to YOU.
courses aren't 100% relevent e.g.
we got stuff like "project management" courses, like as if you're going to give
some spotty kid out of college (no offence ) a project to manage!

It's pretty easy to get into as there are shortages, I never had much trouble since getting
employment and the pay is OK.

new developer, well I got lots of tedious Oracle Pro*C stuff.
but it's like any trade, you got to start at the bottom.

what to learn? everything you can. you need a rounded knowledge.
some new boy will spend weeks writing a java app to do some whizz-bang thing
and I'll knock it up in an afternoon using grep sort paste cut
that's what experience teaches you.

First thing companies will luk is ur DEGREE certificate so getting degree is a must so go to college
unix/linux administration is in gud demand companies require man power @ administration
just be an API developer in any telecom industry gud at c/c++ with linux as ur platform
Embedded field requires BSP developers,device driver coding (thats my domain) many semiconductor industries that r manufacturing controllers like freescale does Board Support Package

if u want a challenge enter embedded field ,money u want to make out of linux enter admin side

Good idea to study more than just software engineering in college. Software jobs come and go, get a business degree with a lot of programming classes. I've been through a number of programming jobs, sysadmin, etc. The software business seems to go through some really lean cycles, and it's good to have other skills ready to go during those periods.