What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Software Engineer

This is the advice I wish I could tell myself 20 years ago.

“It’s your innie, from the future. Don’t hang up. What’s an innie? Don’t worry about that; just listen.” Photography credit: Sueda Dilli for Unsplash+. (Unsplash+ license, used with permission.)

Having first been paid for professional web development way back in 1998, I started way back when web development was considered an offshoot of graphic design, if you can believe that!

Since then, I got a formal computer science education, tried to become a researcher, and never stopped building websites and apps.

However, I did just about everything wrong, and I didn’t earn a six-figure salary until more than a decade after I graduated college.

Here are the 10 things I wish I knew way back when.

#1) You Don’t Need To Go to College

One of the most awkward moments in my professional software engineering career was when I asked a room full of 100 software engineers what I considered an innocuous icebreaker.

What was your favorite class in college?

The next 15 minutes were some of the most excruciating of my life, as a third of the team revealed that they had never even bothered to go to college, and another third had dropped out of college.