This was a great conversation with Vic Vijayakumar. We covered MANY topics, including:
- Importance of hobbies outside of work
- Job titles across companies
- What “good” onboarding looks like for a Junior Engineer
- How Vic got into programming
- Computer Engineering vs. Computer Science as a major
- Gaining an intuition about code
- Looking at Software engineering less as “the tech industry” and more about using technology to help enable people to do the things they want to do
- Helping researchers communicate about their work
- Picking a language that is most appropriate for the job at hand
- How to get up to speed in a new language
- Skills gained in the early years of a career
- How learning on the side can help one’s career
- Compensation over Vic’s career
- Manager vs. IC role
- Founding Engineer role
- Handling interview nerves
- Talking in interviews
- Work mistake - causing email spam
- Importance of networking through meetups, or even Reddit
- Ways to test whether software engineering is for you
You can find Vic on his own webpage as well as on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Take a listen to Vic's podcast here.
We talked about finding salary data at Levels.fyi
And "trying out" programming, which you can do at Codecademy.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/data-and-dev/message