Technology Courses At CityU of Seattle

Interesting article for those who are looking at computer science and programming as a career move. Auren Hoffman did a guest post over at Techcrunch about how software engineers can be a competitive edge when starting a company, so you should stock up on them because they are going to be the people who help companies keep their competitive edge once the recession starts to fade.

With all the focus on careers and how people can remain employed in a company the bottom line to most of this is not just the value you bring to the company, but how you use your social capital and how you use your value to increase survivability and help the company through what is arguably the worst recession since 1982. Auren Hoffman wrote an inspired article on Techcrunch about this, and one that would be good for everyone to read, it is about value, but it is also what you bring to the table, how you build your skills and how you approach your career.

This means that today’s companies are able to do more software engineering and build more stuff with fewer people. But should they do more with less? It could be much more prudent for a company, especially for a small company, to do the opposite … and to double-down on engineering. You can use the productivity gains in software development as a strategic advantage and invest aggressively in engineers. First, doing so contributes the most to progress and also increases the chance for breakthroughs in innovation. Second, engineers – as opposed to salesmen and marketers – can often hit the ground running (assuming you have a good on-boarding system) and have a positive impact within a few weeks. Source: Techcrunch

If you are in school as a computer science major, the best thing you can do is be comfortable working with a number of systems, open source, closed source, and understanding via reading code how these systems work. With all the software written, there are excellent examples of how to approach your career from the understanding that the only limitations are the ones that you put on yourself. Code changes, new languages come online and gain adherents, but are they the best for what you want to do, and what the company hopes to gain from it. While we struggle to break the traditional stereotype of what a programmer is, the rules and lifestyles have changed. Programmers are just as likely to be cool as they are likely to be disengaged from the company.

Software engineers should understand the companies that they work for and be looking for innovative ways to cut down the time it takes to do a thing. This means the software engineer has to understand the whole company rather than just their own corner of it. Or that the software engineer has to understand the whole product rather than just the stitch together code. Software engineers can be a benefit to a company, but only if they are looking for ways to help cut down the time to do something. With the cost of a startup coming way down (a friend of mine did a startup for 12,000 dollars and is doing quite nicely now, and he is a software engineer) the ability to leverage existing systems to build something cool is something that all software engineers should know. That means they have to adopt lifelong learning and innovation as a baseline. Once the software engineer has that, they can be one of the best assets that a company has.

This is a worth reading article for everyone, as it gives a good view into how companies are leveraging everything they have to keep competitive in today’s market.

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