How To Get Experience as a Software Engineer?

Learn how to get more experience as a SWE and grow faster in your career. (5 min)

Here is the secret sauce:
The more problems you solve, the more experience you get.

In the past, I made many mistakes and learned some lessons along the way.

From playing around with different languages and frameworks with the idea of getting more experience to working on the same thing for too long.

And there’s one truth:

There are no shortcuts to getting experience.

You have to put in the time and effort.

However, there are several things you can do to increase your return on investment (ROI) or ensure that the time you invest contributes to your career development and growth.

In today’s article, I’ll share some of the lessons and realizations I’ve gained.

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Where Experience Comes From

Generally speaking, you gain experience by facing new situations and challenges and actively looking into solving them.

You learn something from each outcome.

You could do that incrementally over some period of time by working for company X for Y period of time.

However, the quality of experience doesn’t necessarily relate to the quantity of experience and time one puts in.

Unpopular opinion:
You can get the same or more significant quality of experience in a shorter period of time.

What matters in the end is the quality, not the quantity.

To gain more technical experience:

You have to expose yourself to various software-related problems and then work hard to find solutions and solve those problems.

A person can become a Senior in less than 3-4 years, while others become Seniors after 7-8 years.

Of course, time and experience correlate, but looking at a resume with 10+ years of experience doesn’t tell you how good the engineer is.

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Where To Find Problems & Gain Experience

It really depends on the type of experience you want to obtain.

Personally, I got the most experience from 5 things.

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1. Work

If you’re working in a growing company, the number of problems to solve is endless.

There’s always the next problem to solve.

This is crucial if you want to gain more experience.

At some companies, you can also change domains and teams, which will expose you to a completely different set of problems.

This way, you can get a variety of experiences.

However, if you’re stuck in a company where the problems don’t vary, you won’t get the most of your time while working.

You’ll be solving the same problem over and over again.

I’ve experienced both situations and from now on, I’m really focused on working for a company where I can solve different and more challenging problems.

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2. Personal Projects

Working on personal projects is another awesome way to gain more diverse experience.

I’ve co-founded three technical startups in the past.

I’ve learned many things, from ideation to launching the product and talking with clients.

I had to learn a few things about marketing, sales, working with other software engineers, delegation, project management, deployment, and much more.

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3. Open Source

Reading open-source codebases and looking into issues was another way for me to see other people’s code and way of thinking.

I saw interesting patterns, good and bad practices, which helped me learn how to and not to solve particular problems.

For example, I’ve read codebases of Flowbite, React-Query, Material UI, and others.

Here, it is important to understand what you read.

There could be some legacy parts of the codebase with bad practices and bad code.

You shouldn’t copy them but rather see how things shouldn’t be done.

That’s how you learn how to better solve a particular set of problems.

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4. Become An Expert In a Specific Domain

Another thing I did was to become and expert in a specific domain.

In my case, I decided to focus on React and Node.js while combining good Software Design and Architecture practices.

First, I had to dig deep into React and Node.js to learn how to create good UIs and backends.

Then, I had to learn many things about how good code and architectures are crafted.

That’s how I became knowledgeable about questions related to React, Node, or Software Design and Architecture.

Even when I get asked about something I don’t know, that’s another problem to solve and more experience to get.

After learning all that, I decided to write a book on that.

That’s how you turn solved problems into opportunities.

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I wrote a comprehensive guide on React Architecture, Design, and Clean Code.

The book consists of six chapters, containing 74+ principles and rules, described in 108 pages, including 80+ code snippets.

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5. Writing

A few years ago I started documenting my learnings, findings, and solved problems.

I also started writing blog posts.

When I write on a specific topic I find myself not very sure about certain things.

I have to dig deeper into the topic to understand it better.

That’s how I expose myself to more problems.

Writing helps me clarify my thoughts and way of thinking.

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📋 Recap

• You develop more experience as you face and solve various problems.

• The quality of experience you get is much more important then its quantity.

• You get better by solving different problems (same as reps in the gym).

• You can gain experience by work, personal projects, open source, becoming an expert in a domain, or through writing.

That's all for today. I hope this was helpful. ✌️

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