I have been in what is called the software services industry for the past 6 and a half years now and in that last 6 and a half years I have come to realize that there are distinctly two different paths you can take if you are a software engineer.(And lets cut the crap of the different titles people have as junior programmer, senior programmer, architect, designer etc etc, lets keep it simple a software engineer is one who builds software to solve problems)

1. The first path is where you are building software to solve business problems directly
2. The second path is where you build software so that people on the first path can use it to solve business problems.

When I started off I really did not see much difference between them, but as I progressed I saw the paths diverging more and more.So one needs to really pay attention when they start off on what path they like , which I unfortunately realized a little late :-(

To be successful on Path 1

• You need to love talking to the business people and understand their requirements and gain their confidence.
• You need to be a jack of all trades, need to do (boring?) things like requirements analysis, do reviews, come up with designs, code them, test them.(But you would rarely need much knowledge of any of the things they taught you at school under the science called computer science)
• Your presentation skills and communication skills play a big part in being successful
• You will eventually have to take care of a team of software engineers and a good amount of your time will be spent on being responsible for their work as well
• And finally you become technology agonistic, you know no coding just creating presentations and word documents and understanding standards is what it means :-)

I have never been on path 2 though I wish so much I was there.Atleast from what I see Path 2 seems a much more fun place to be in if you like

• Hacking more and talking less to people especially who don't exactly understand how computers work(a.k.a customers)
• Yeah you need to document,design,code as well here but much more fun doing this for say the next version of your pet Firefox extension than if you are doing this for release 17 of an old application for pulling customer number information from a stupid mainframe system
• If your hacking skills are par excellence, people will bear with your pathetic presentation and communication skills .Afterall its the inside that matters and not the outside
• Maybe you will end up being a lead here as well, but I am sure there are multiple projects where the complexity of the project is so high that you will still be valuable as an indiviual contributor
• The more you are here the more interesting problems you will solve and the more cool you will become and more cool you are.Its a perspective again, some people might find IT Architects from big corporations wearing 3 piece suits and doing slick presentations cool but then lets screw those people now :-P
  

PS:Now don't get me wrong I know there are problems in the domain of path 1 which are extremely challenging and I know there are problems in path 2 which are very boring,I am just talking of the averages of what I *think* it is like to be in path 1 and path 2