Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?

Adding my 2 cents over a number of otherwise good advice: know your tools, maintain them. I have worked years on embedded SW. Often the tools suck:

- complicated or unreliable build

- debugging with traces, sometimes traces are not even reliable

- slow flashing

- low acceptance of verification: Valgrind (on target), Coverity (on host)

- and worst of all: unreliable hardware.

Of course each of those items teach you something, although that's mostly patience and rigor :)

Suggestions to keep high efficiency, high motivation:

- maintain your build, fix it when partial build is broken (no "make clean all").

- optimize flashing speed

- find and use a good code indexer

- find/buy tools that will help you find bugs early: Valgrind and Coverity are in this category

Don't let your ego become entangled with your work. If you work for someone else, always remember that you're hired help and they have the final say. It doesn't matter how small or flat the company is, unless you own it, you work at the behest of another. You don't need to agree with decisions. You can think they are disastrous or completely misguided but if the CEO or tech lead wants to pursue that course, that's their prerogative.

Participate in good faith and if you think you have a valuable suggestion, make it. Best case scenario, it's taken on board and people think you're great. Worst case scenario, it's ignored, you move on and still get your paycheck. If you feel the ratio of bad decisions to good decisions is too high, just find a different job. Trying to change a bad company is like trying to change a bad romantic partner. Maybe it's possible but its a huge investment.

Don't be dogmatic. Don't get angry and don't be obstinate. At the end of the day, it will just wear you down. In my experience, you'll get further as the good engineer who can compromise when necessary than the great engineer who is unyielding.

Overall the best outcome is you put in your contractually obligated hours, do work that is mostly interesting or fulfilling in some way and then get your pay. If you want to execute on some grand vision or produce work that is a true reflection of you as a person, do it in your spare time or start your own company.

Exactly. There seems to be such a push in the industry to be "passionate", which translates into working extra hours and working on open source in your free time

It's perfectly fine to be passionate during work hours and live your life the rest of the time and people shouldn't be shunned for that

very good books, thanks ;p

Have an exit plan with fallback skillset. The current SW industry is due to go through a dramatic implosion once AI truly takes off.