Flora and Fauna of Silicon Valley

The sun was just setting in Silicon Valley. The clocks had moved 1 hour ahead. It was a day after april fool's day. But apparently none of these things mattered in silicon valley. What mattered and what was discussed was the new startups to be launched, money to be made. Everyone was dreaming of being a millionaire. Solutions to the problems that had not yet surfaced in real world were already being proposed. People spent a lot of time in front of computer screens. It was as if a mass hysteria had swept the valley, it was cool to be technophile. Society had ceased to exist except for what remained in chatrooms and blogs. Were they simply using netscape or they had simply escaped in to the Net. Nobody was interested in answers to these questions, as long as they could see new electornics advertisements in valley's murky newspapers.

He had just stepped out of the office. It was Sunday. What the heck was he doing in the office on Sunday, he asked himself. Should one work to live or live to work, this eternal question came to his mind. Would it all be worth in the end, he thought. Probably not. It was a race he did not want to participate in.

Life of a software engineer !!

In this essay I will try to describe the life of a software engineer. My focus will be on the kind of problems faced by a software engineer in his day to day life and the pros and cons in the career of software engineering.

Life of a software engineer is hard. Work hours can be very unusual. Motivation is a key factor in the life of a software engineer. If the engineer loses his or her motivation, he will not be able to focus on his work and the quality of his work will suffer.

Many software engineers work odd hours fixing bugs or maintaining some piece of code. Some people consider this a very drab and boring kind of work, staring at the computer screen for hours. It leads to stress, fatigue and "burn out".

Let us look closely at the issue of "burn out". It is very rare to see old software engineers. Why ?. Because software engineering is essentially a work that depends a lot on motivation. Young people in the early part of their career are most motivated about technical aspects and are willing to put lot of time understanding, designing and implementing a problem. As time passes on and people become old, they loose the challange of trying to fix a piece of code or "hacking" to see how some thing works.

Although, a lot of parents of young students are attracted to sotware engineering career for their children, they often have no idea about negative sides of this career. Often these parents have read in media about high paying salaries that software engineers are paid. In fact, if high salaries and lure of money is what attracts someone to software career, he will soon find himself away from software as the original objective of money is achieved.

In conclusion, I would like to state that even with the high remuneration that softwae engineers are usually paid, there are more negative aspects than positive aspects in the life of a software engineer, hence I would not recommend this career path to a new student in his or her highschool.