I got my job at Microsoft right after finishing data structures. I had been working as a Boeing software engineer for 6 months and before that I had been a mechanical engineer. I have been there now for 3 years and have really enjoyed it. The work life balance has been great and the people I work with are also very nice.
When I first started the position I was pretty intimidated. I felt like I somehow snuck in since I wasn’t close to finishing the degree and really had very little experience as a software engineer. I had never even made an HTTP request when I started working. I was immediately tasked with web development work since I work on the Azure team. Most of the time I would get handed a project and have no clue how I was going to do it and just had to nod my head and say I could get it done. Fortunately most things in software engineering can be found online, so I was able to learn a lot without having to ask my teammates dumb questions… like what is a GET request… There is also a ton of internal jargon as with anywhere, but being new to both the field and the company I didn’t know how much of the jargon was stuff I should know vs Microsoft stuff there is no way I would know. That added to the intimidation.
After a while I have started to feel a lot more secure on the team. I now feel pretty comfortable and enjoy my job a lot. The worst part about many jobs in the software industry is on call. I have on call for 2 weeks 5 weeks a year. I am on call from 9am to 9pm and back up one of the 2 weeks. We have an India team which does the night time. On call isn’t really that bad in terms of volume of incidents, the worst part is just that you have to stay around the house incase you get a call.
In all I am so glad I made the switch to software and have really enjoyed the work. One last thing I like with respect to mechanical is that my turn around time on a lot of my work is much faster. In mechanical I would design something and then wait for the parts to be made and we would assemble and things could take months. In software I finishes pieces of code in less than a week that get deployed an used.
