Software engineer, skills, demand, salary, entrepreneurship

Software engineer and software engineering are two hot topics of discussion in modern world.

Who is Software engineer?

A software engineer is a professional having profound knowledge about software engineering and its principles. Learn software engineering in detail @Software engineering tutorial

What software engineers do?

Software engineers around the world, use their learnings and skills to do following tasks:

gather the requirements for product to be developed.
clearly understand the client requirements and do feasibility test before proceeding with product development.
create suitable software design for the software product to be developed.
convert the software design into code using proper and advanced programming language.
test the code thoroughly to get the finished software product.
once the software product is developed and tested, it is delivered to the client after clients testing.
manage the entire life cycle of product development from inception to delivery.

However the job of software engineer is not over yet. There is more for software engineer to do apart from above activity.

Software engineer may be required to give support and maintenance activity to the software delivered as and when required based on the contract or agreement with Client. And this activity may be required for the complete lifecycle till the Client is using the product.

►So you can see that a software engineer has a huge duty and responsibility on their shoulders. All the activity listed above has very large scope and thus is not handled by an individual but by a team of software engineers.

A software engineer is not a result of securing some professional course. Rather, after the course they go through rigorous training, on job experience of years, learning from mistakes, thus gathering experience and turning into a proper software engineer.

Today the entire world is dependent on software engineer.

Be it any field, software engineer have proved their mettle to automate the complex areas like surgery, robotics, security, banking, e-commerce, entertainment and what not.

It is due to the effort of software engineer that world can learn new concepts or technology sitting at the comfort of their home through e-learning websites or YouTube. It is due to the intellect of software engineer that you can book your train or air-ticket on a click of a button of your laptop or mobile phone. Similar to Amazon, Flipkart, Lenskart etc. that allows you to do online shopping.

A complete software engineer is an institution in himself or herself.

Characteristics of software engineer

To be a good software engineer one must posses following characteristics:

Software engineer must have good understanding and familiarity with the principles of software engineering.
Good domain knowledge and technical knowledge in the domain area.
Good command over programming language.
Good communication skill to make others understand his perspective on project.
Good written and interpersonal skills.
Sound knowledge of fundamentals of computer science.
Software engineer must be capable of working in a team.
As engineering is a principle based so a software engineer must have proper discipline.

Above are in general list of software engineer skills.

Demand of software engineer

If you have gone through above part of this article then you must have been amused at me for praising software engineers. Definitely, they are worthy of praise for their service to the world.

And such is the impact of their work worldwide that every software engineer has huge demand in world market.

Whole world is working online today.

Being online dependent simply means the dependency on software, website, apps. Isn't it?

And by now you already know that these are all developed, tested, secured and managed by a team of software engineers.

Lets understand the reason for huge demand of software engineers.

Consider banking sector for example.

A bank allows online banking facility today. Now consider the nature and impact of banking business. A glitch in online banking website, banking app, ATM machine may result in multi-million dollars loss for the bank.

So to ensure proper functioning of their website, apps, ATM they employ brilliant software engineers. Most of the time they enter into contract with software firms (third party) having expertise in developing, testing, maintaining, securing, supporting and enhancing these websites, apps, and softwares. Now engineers of the bank work in co-ordination with third party engineers to ensure proper handling of all the mentioned activities.

►You must be surprised to know that to handle all the above mentioned tasks one reputed bank hires thousands and thousands of engineers.

After studing above example, try to figure out how many banks are there in the world? So a banking sector would employ huge man power. Right?

Now there are other sectors like, retail, health care, life sciences, travel & hospitality, robotics, etc.

Hope, now you can guess where the demand for software engineers come from?

Salary of software engineer

A software engineers salary varies to a great extent based upon their:

college or institution passed out (mostly for freshers)
area of expertise,
years of experience,
location of job posting,
type of hiring company

You can get details of what an average salary of software engineer is based on the above factors using the below urls.

We don't hold any relation with those mentioned websites. Above links are shared for just analysis purpose. Actual salary may still vary.

However above websites will help you understand what salary you can expect by entering details like location, years of experience, position applied for, etc.

Popular programming language for software developers

If you are aspiring to be software engineer then learning few of these programming languages may significantly catapult your journey.

Python programming
Java programming
R programming
C programming
C++ programming
C# programming
PHP programming

These technologies helps to develop backend of the application.

Similarly there are few database technologies for software engineer that you can opt for:

Oracle
MySQL
MongoDB
SQL Server
SQLite
PostgreSQL

These are required to handle the database part of any application.

Similarly there are few frontend technologies for software engineers:

HTML
CSS
Javascript
Node.js
JQuery

These are required to render the processed data (given by combination of programming languge + database) to display properly on devices screen.

There are other technologies in each category but list is huge so all can't be mentioned here.

Each technology is vast and requires lots of time to become expert in it.

However beginners can just stick to the basics and rest you will learn on job while working in company.

You don't need to learn each one of them.

You can understand picking one or two from each list like (Java+Oracle+HTML/CSS/Javascript) or anyone based on your choice.

And it will help you easily understand others, in case you are required to work on it.

Entrepreneurship scope for software engineers

After having studied this article thoroughly you should have no doubt that a software engineer have a huge scope of being an entrpreneur. Every online business is dependent on combination of some frontend technology, backend technology and database.

And who knows them better than software engineer?

Every thing that we see around the world can be brought online and most of them has already been done like:

Online shopping - Amazon.com, Flipkart.com, Snapdeal.com, etc.
Online cab booking - Ola.com, Uber.com, Meru.com, etc.
Online trip/hotel booking - Booking.com, Yatra.com,
Online learning - tutorialsinhand.com, udemy.com, pluralsight.com, stackoverflow.com, etc.

These are list of few sectors only.

Explore around there are many other sectors and many other such examples.

As a software engineer you have got great potential to be the next reputed entrepreneur. Try and think over already explored or unexplored field and fish out an idea to change the world.

Idea need not be completely unique. You can simply convert your family business online at simplest level.

At last cheers to all aspiring and working software engineers around the world for making our life simple with your innovation, hard work and dedication.

Software Engineering

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About the Author

Sonu Pandit
Technology geek, loves to write and share knowledge with the world. Having 10+ years of IT experience. B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering

Page Views : Published Date : Jul 05,2020

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