The All Purpose Engineer

Answer 1

The job category of a software engineer encompasses many more disciplines than one may think upon first glance. The software engineer, especially for larger projects, usually has his or her responsibilities limited for a specific purpose. What this means is that it is good to be a jack of all trades if you want to be a software engineer, because you never know in which capacity you will be needed. To illustrate:

Software engineers are called by many other professional names based on their specialty, including Quality Assurance Engineer, Java Developer, Design Engineer, or Web Services Programmer. However, there are some programming language and platform industry standards that every software engineer should learn, like C++, Oracle, and Java. One trait that many of the more successful software engineers share is keeping up with changes in these industry standards and immediately add any new programming standards to his or her repertoire.

Some of the more common job responsibilities for the software engineer could include, but are definitely not limited to:

• Globalizing or localizing software packages
• Maintaining standards compliance
• Overall project management and planning
• Analyzing new technologies for possible implementation
• Integrating any new software with the system already in use
• Supporting, maintaining, and documenting software functionality
• Performance automation, improvement, tuning, usability, and balancing
• Quality assurance testing of software
• User interface design for the front end user
• Software simulation and modeling
• Object oriented analysis and object oriented design (shortened as OOA and OOD)
• Requirements analysis, code analysis, software analysis, identification of code metrics, software reliability analysis, system risk analysis, and software review
• Coding, designing, debugging applications in many various software languages
• Lifecycle application development

Web services positions for the software engineer are in especially high demand as businesses continue to leverage the prevalence and the capability of the internet for all functions from quality control to marketing. Many of the web services positions combine many aspects of the job descriptions listed above, and give the software engineer plenty of room to exercise his or her own ingenuity in improving the current systems.

Mobile technology seems to be the next frontier for the software engineer, as Fortune 100 businesses are expected to spend no less than a quarter of their marketing budget on the technology by 2012.