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.My observation is that you're halfway there when you realize that you need to improve, of the folks I saw who did poorly it was because they didn't realize that you could be both the smartest person in the room and the least capable at the same time.Right now, on your first job experience, even a kid who never went to college is better at programming than you are because they'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've trained yourself to consume, classify, organize, and distill massive amounts of information in a short amount of time.Use that training to consume everything you can on the art of writing programs. Read "Test Driven Development" read "Code Complete", read "Design Patterns", read "The Design of the UNIX Operating System", read "TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1", and a book or two on databases. With your training you should be able to skim through those to identify the various "tricky bits" and get a feel for what is and what is not important in this new field of yours.Soak in as much as you can and ask a lot of questions. Pretty soon no one will know you haven't been doing this your whole life.