My FeedDiscussionsHeadless CMS
New
Sign in
Log inSign up
Learn more about Hashnode Headless CMSHashnode Headless CMS
Collaborate seamlessly with Hashnode Headless CMS for Enterprise.
Upgrade ✨Learn more

How did you determine which career path to choose in software engineering?

Zhongshi Xi's photo
Zhongshi Xi
·Aug 3, 2018

Hi, I recently joined the community and I would like to ask for your thoughts on this question. I would like to introduce my background a little bit more to help you understand the question better. I graduated in 2016 and I decided to explore different software engineering path in 3-4 years, I started as DevOps engineer where I did CI/CD, containerization and automation, then after 1 year and 4 months I did Data Engineering where I developed ETL pipeline with Hadoop, Yarn, Spark, Scala and Oozie. After 6 month, I quit the company for some reason and joined a medium startup consultancy where I am doing full-stack development. Now I feel very confused on which career path I really want to go since I enjoyed DevOps, I enjoyed Data Engineering and I am enjoying full-stack development as well since all of them are creating huge values introduce challenges in different ways.

I heard a lot of words saying that you should not be a generalist, you should be specializing generalist or generalizing specialist in order to get competitive enough to get you a better job and more promising future. So I have been thinking about which career path I really want to go, but how could I approach this decision? Is my decision of exploring different path after graduation correct or wrong? What kind of company I truly fit in?

In my heart, I want to do data engineering since I feel the role is much more challenging and complicated because it is challenging to deal with large volume of collecting, storing, transforming and analyzing data, thus I feel more thrilled about it. But is it the right voice in my heart, what piece is missing?

I would like to hear answers from you who struggled with it before and who have determined on which path you want to go.

Any answers or feedbacks will be greatly appreciated :)