Ask HN: How to transition from academic programming to software engineering?
I have hired some PhDs in your situation and worked with others, I personally just went to work after I got my BSEE.<p>My observation is that you&#x27;re halfway there when you realize that you need to improve, of the folks I saw who did poorly it was because they didn&#x27;t realize that you could be both the smartest person in the room and the least capable at the same time.<p>Right now, on your first job experience, even a kid who never went to college is better at programming than you are because they&#x27;ve been experiencing all the pitfalls that can happen and have built up a knowledge from that which is perhaps more intuitive than formal but serves them well. What you have over that person is that you&#x27;ve trained yourself to consume, classify, organize, and distill massive amounts of information in a short amount of time.<p>Use that training to consume everything you can on the art of writing programs. Read &quot;Test Driven Development&quot; read &quot;Code Complete&quot;, read &quot;Design Patterns&quot;, read &quot;The Design of the UNIX Operating System&quot;, read &quot;TCP&#x2F;IP Illustrated Volume 1&quot;, and a book or two on databases. With your training you should be able to skim through those to identify the various &quot;tricky bits&quot; and get a feel for what is and what is not important in this new field of yours.<p>Soak in as much as you can and ask a lot of questions. Pretty soon no one will know you haven&#x27;t been doing this your whole life.