Inherent Skills Required to be a SWE?
I got totally wrecked in another post where I asked what to tell someone you don’t think will make it as a SWE. According to Blind, my entire premise that someone might not be able to make it was wrong. So now I’m curious, does Blind think there are any special, inherent characteristics that make a good SWE? Or can literally everything required to be good be learned by anyone? Obviously, there are edge cases—people born with disabilities that make them unable to do any job. But for someone who is at least capable of holding a standard minimum wage job, are there any special skills or capabilities required to become a SWE? Skills that can’t be learned? Take for example, basketball. I love it, and I’m fairly good at it, but no one will pay me to do it. I’m just inherently too short to become a paid professional.
Wtf being a SWE isn't like winning a Turing Award, Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. You don't need some crazy talent - anyone can become a SWE, it's basically a trade job.
This. SWE is the modern factory job of the Internet Age.
Really makes me wonder what people do under the title “SWE” when they have this opinion. Are you all not solving complex problems that stretch the limits of your abilities?
Maybe not truly good, but with proper effort anyone can become a mediocre SWE (which is enough for most things)
How does this explain the generally slow, shitty and buggy software with horrible Ui? Hardware keeps getting faster, there are now ssds evrywhere and shiload of available ram, and you get 6 core processors in even the most crappy pcs and macs, yet software experience blows compared to even 10 years ago. Please do explain all of you wizard Swe
> 110 IQ. 130+ for top jobs.
This is reasonable in my opinion, but no one else here seems to think so.
IMO - the following three are absolutely necessary if you want to be a SWE 1. You should enjoy solving problems 2. You should enjoy programming and designing abstractions 3. You should be able to focus If you want to grow as a SWE, you should also enjoy writing down design documents, preparing and giving presentations, interacting with the larger team and figuring out what you can do to help them, mentoring etc. One of the most underrated aspects is the ability to focus. In most places, the difference between the top performer and the median performer is the ability to focus more than raw smarts. The best performers I’ve seen can put in 5-6 hours of solid productivity per day; a median performer puts up 2-3 hours of solid productivity per day; an underperformer probably works 5-6 hours a week.
ability to listen and undertand what customers want and think outside of dev ivory tower. your users are your customers - listen to them
Usually we have PMs for that. Of all people, Microsoft should know that because of the astronomical number of PMs relative to other companies in tech 😅
So anyone can become swe in current market. For sure some small company or even freelancer project will want someone to code a little for them. But to become more mainstream. Get into faang or even just have a career like most ppl here on blind I think def takes some inherent talent (though not much). And hard work (a lot of it). Basically what I am saying is as long as someone has basic common sense logical reasoning down. They can learn to be swe. But don't underestimate how many people lack basic logical reasoning.