In this guide, we'll break down the role of software engineers, explore various positions within the field, and show you the different industries they work in.
To get you the most accurate and up-to-date insights, we've consulted with the following engineers:
Let's dive in!
1. What's a software engineer?
✨ "Software engineer" defined
🔍 What do software engineers do?
🌈 What are the different types of software engineers?
2. Where do software engineers work?
3. Where can I find internships?
Imagine telling your smart speaker to play your favorite song. In this interaction, you give a command, and the speaker understands and acts on it.
Software engineers do something similar. They're essentially pros at "telling" computers what to do – just with instructions that are a lot more detailed than the ones we give our smart devices!
These instructions, called code, are written in specific programming languages that computers can understand. Software engineers translate complex problems into these step-by-step instructions, allowing computers to perform intricate tasks and bring our ideas to life.
Software engineers use their technical expertise to solve real-world problems. To better understand this, let's take the example of Prosple – your friendly internship platform – and see how engineers solve a problem from start to finish.
Here at Prosple, we noticed a problem. When students (like you) hunt for internships: either you're stuck with limited options from your school, or you're lost in the endless sea of Google searches. It hit us — why not create a single place where every internship you could want is just a click away?
To clear the fog, we decided to build a website with a smart, easy-to-use search tool that allows you to find internships by industry, location, and their field of study. We wanted to make the search process as simple as flipping through a magazine.
Our tech team got to work, coding a clean, user-friendly interface. They made sure the search tool was up and running without a hitch, conducting tests with real students to get their thumbs-up. The focus was on ensuring the website was intuitive, fast, and responsive.
Upon launch, we kept an ear to the ground, eager to hear what students thought. Feedback was golden, leading to tweaks like adding a feature for students to save their favorite internships and get notified about similar opportunities.
Listening to student suggestions, Prosple continually updated the search tool, making it even easier to use. We added more filters, like the ability to search for internships that accept international students.
The process described here applies to all engineering disciplines – it's essentially the scientific method!
– Former engineer @ Meta
It's a good idea to get a feel for what kinds of software engineering you're interested in through internships. Here are some common roles divided into categories:
These are the engineers who are mainly responsible for building things.
#1 Front-end engineers design and build the interactive elements you see and use on websites and apps. Think buttons, menus, and anything you can click on!
Front-end developers basically work on what's being shown on the "device" side. The device makes all these requests to the servers, which are where the back-end part starts.
– Former engineer @ Meta
As a front-end engineer, you can specialize in mobile apps or web interfaces.
#2 Back-end engineers work behind the scenes, creating the logic and data storage that makes websites and apps function. They handle things like databases, servers, and core functionality.
#3 Full-stack engineers handle both front-end and back-end development, making them valuable all-rounders who can see a project through from start to finish.
#4 Embedded applications or devices developer: These engineers create software for devices where the software is hidden within the hardware. They might work on smartwatches, medical devices, or industrial control systems.
Their tech stack is quite different from other engineers. For instance, back-end development is a lot of Python, Go or Java, and front-end development is javascript and HTML.
But with embedded development, since you're working closer to the raw hardware, a lot of your work will involve lower-level programming languages like C. "Low-level" here doesn't mean it's easier. It means that these languages talk more directly to the machine and hardware itself.
Think about it like this: Software engineers give clear instructions to computers.
- To get a computer to dance in a high-level language, you'd just tell it to "dance."
- To do the same in a low-level language, you'd have to be very clear and explicit about everything you want it to do: e.g. "Raise your elbow by 35 degrees, hold. Rotate palm by 20 degrees. Hold."
You also wouldn't be able to rely on frameworks the way front- and back-end developers can. In fact, you might be the one tying frameworks to the hardware so the rest of us can just use those frameworks to code!
Partly this is because of resource constraints. For example, if your product is a smartwatch, you're working with a slower computer with less battery, so your computations need to be concise and not waste time or energy. That's why you speak directly to the computer instead of going through frameworks, which takes more computational power.
– Former engineer @ Meta
The work doesn't end when an app is built! It has to be tested, released, and maintained after the release too.
#5 DevOps engineers: DevOps engineers are like the bridge between coders and the final app.
Most companies have some kind of approval process for new code. Generally, your peers and managers will review your code.
Once your code has been approved for release:
- A testing system will test it in a "shadow system" to simulate what happens to the system when new code is put in ("Will the system crash or break?").
- The deployment system will then figure out a way to swap in this new code without bringing the website or app down for too long.
DevOps are the ones maintaining and improving this flow. Their challenge is finding better ways to test the code and making sure new code flows into the products smoothly (without breaking things).
As a result, DevOps engineers don't need to write as much code as other engineers. However, they need to be on top of industry standards, best practices, and the latest tools to help their company set up the best processes for quickly testing and releasing code.
And after release, they need to monitor the system to make sure the new code doesn't break anything else in the system.
– Former engineer @ Meta
#6 QA (quality assurance) engineers are responsible for a lot of manual testing of the software.
QA engineers follow test plans, which go something like:
- Case 1: Click here, click there, type this, does it break?
- Case 2: Click here, click there, don't type, does it break?
DevOps engineers also do testing, but they maintain the systems that perform automated testing while QA engineers take care of manual testing.
Manual testing exists because there are things that are really hard to automate. For example, Facebook had tons of QA engineers to test end-to-end user flows. Think: "Download the app, sign up, now do this and that, does it get laggy? Does the layout of the app break?"
In automated tests, we'd test lower-level things like "When someone creates a request on their app, the app sends a request for account registration. Does our database now have one more account? If so, great! If not, then we know something will go wrong when users register." Since my current company only needs to test processes like these (we don't have an app), we don't have QA engineers.
– Former engineer @ Meta
#7 Site reliability engineers (SRE) are responsible for ensuring the reliability and scalability of websites and internet applications. They use automation and coding to monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain large software systems.
Whereas DevOps engineers take care of code before it goes live, site reliability engineers maintain and protect the system after it's live.
For example, every New Year's Eve, people send lots of videos and texts to friends and family on Facebook. You can imagine how much the server demand goes up. SREs are the ones making sure that the servers aren't dying. They answer questions like "Do we need to spin up more servers to handle these requests?" or "How do we know how strained our servers are?"
– Former engineer @ Meta
Data engineer: In today's data-driven world, data engineers are crucial. They build and maintain the systems that collect, store, and analyze large amounts of data. They're like data wranglers, making information usable for data scientists and other applications.
Game developer: If you love video games, this could be your dream job! Game developers design and build all the software that makes games work, from graphics and physics to artificial intelligence and gameplay mechanics.
There are some big differences between game developers and other kinds of developers.
- The talent pool: You need art skills, passion, and an understanding of video games, on top of software engineering skills to be a game developer. Almost every young engineer talks about wanting to be a game developer, but the overlap of having good art and engineering skills filters out a lot of people.
- The strict deadlines: For example, while we don't need a new version of Facebook to go out at a certain time, video games have a user base that expects a new version to come out every year. The companies release trailers and all the fans line up and buy physical copies – so you have a lot of pressure to get things out the door on time. (In a famous case of what can go wrong, the marketing and business people at a game development company committed to a timeline that wasn't feasible for engineers, so they ended up shipping a very half-baked product.)
- The pay: Game development tends to pay less.
- The tech stack: Game developers code in gaming engines like Unreal and Unity.
– Former engineer @ Meta
As a software engineer, you mainly have the choice of working in-house for a company or at an IT consulting firm, where you would make software for different companies.
Working in-house as a software engineer means you're employed by a company to work on software projects specifically for that company's own use. This can be a very rewarding path because you get to focus on building and improving products or services directly related to the core business of where you work.
Here are a few examples to make it clearer:
Tech company: If you're an in-house software engineer at a company like Google, you might be working on improving their search engine or developing new features for one of their apps like Google Maps or Gmail.
Retail company: At a retail company like Walmart, software engineers work on the company’s website and internal software systems that help manage inventory, process payments, or enhance the online shopping experience for customers.
Bank: In-house engineers at a bank like Chase might develop and maintain apps that allow customers to check their balance, transfer money, or deposit checks using their smartphones.
Gaming Company: Working as a software engineer at a gaming company means you could be involved in creating new video games or updating existing ones, focusing on everything from game mechanics to graphics and user interface.
The alternative is to work as an IT consultant. In these roles, software engineers build software for external clients rather than for the company they are directly employed by. Here are a few examples to illustrate this.
Consulting firm: As a software engineer at a consulting firm like Accenture or Deloitte, you might work on projects for different companies, helping them develop new software solutions or improve existing ones based on their specific needs and objectives.
Software development agency: If you work for a development agency, you could be involved in creating customized software for various clients across industries. This might include developing websites, mobile apps, or specialized software tools tailored to each client’s requirements.
In each case, engineers working as consultants or at agencies are not focused on internal company projects but are instead applying their skills to a range of challenges and problems across various businesses and industries.
Here are some pros of working as an IT consultant.
- Impressive clients: IT consulting firms often work with globally-recognized clients. This means you can add prestigious names to your resume, even if you're working as a contractor. For example, you might be able to say you worked for American Express.
- Multiple job opportunities: When you apply to a consulting firm, you're essentially applying to multiple companies at once. The process typically works like this: You apply to the consulting firm, a recruiter calls you, and then they submit your resume to their various clients. This can lead to multiple interview opportunities right from the start.
Here are some cons of working as an IT consultant.
- Job insecurity: As a contractor, your position is often temporary. If your contract ends (say, after 12 months) and it's not renewed, that's it - you're out of a job.
- Limited benefits: You won't be a direct employee of the client company. Instead, you'll be a contractor through the consulting firm. So if you're a contractor for American Express, you won't receive benefits from American Express – you'll get them from the consulting firm instead, and often, the benefits package isn't as comprehensive.
- Pay: Contractors typically receive hourly wages instead of a salary. This can be a double-edged sword. While you might earn more for overtime, you also might not have paid time off. If you take a vacation or a sick day, you may not get paid for those hours.
– Former senior software engineer @ Citibank
You can find plenty of internships on Prosple. We have a vast selection of internships curated for students like you. Just filter 'til you find the right fit!
For more deep dives into the world of software engineering, check out: