I'm a CS sophomore who started writing Perl scripts to parse text, then moved to fullstack web development and tinkered with ML theory a bit. I've recently been reading some books on Haskell and practicing competitive programming. I have an upcoming FAANG internship for which I haven't been assigned a project yet. I'm really overwhelmed by the fact that the software engineering spectrum is so broad and that you can do so many things and I fear learning a lot about some specific subject just to find out later that I'm not interested in it anymore (which has happened to me before). How did you find out you loved a specific field in software engineering and how did you create a path/plan to follow to keep improving in it?
Tech Industry
6h
653
Postpone Meta Start Date?
Tech Industry
7h
869
I haven’t done shit today!
AMA
Yesterday
3671
I’m a professional coaster AMA
Tech Industry
11h
2772
Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
Tech Industry
Yesterday
37373
Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
I learned what I liked by trying all the things! Don't worry, you won't get pigeon holed unless it's by choice. If I were you I'd keep exploring full stack engineering... I personally wouldn't read Haskell, but find the best practices for commonly used languages used at FAANG. From here you can continue following what interests you while having a solid software engineering foundation.
Thanks! I already have experience in JS, C++ and Python, so I was interested in the promise of "cleaner code", "pure functions" and all the hype surrounding Haskell and so far I have found it to be a pleasant journey, although I know that language doesn't have much demand right now.
Jack of all trades, master of none. It's a software engineering delima.
At this stage of your career, focus more on figuring out what you don’t like. When you find what you like, you’ll know it.
My advice for someone this early is to just shoot for software engineer roles (which is most jobs) and just get there do whatever needs to be done. Not much need to worry about specializing in this field unless you really want to or wanna do something math heavy like ML.
I knew from the start what I wanted to do but not everyone else starts that way, find problems you might like to solve and work in that direction
What you do?
Area of interest is a myth.. be open