Junior Software Engineer

The social network made software engineers look like hoodie-wearing geniuses typing green code in a dark room. The reality is closer to a 24-year-old shipping the code that millions of people will tap on this week, and reading other people's work to make sure the rest still runs. A graduate engineer at a big tech firm writes code about 32% of the time. 23% goes to meetings, stand-ups, planning, design reviews. The remaining 35% is maintenance, testing, security patching and waiting for builds to compile. The ratio of code read to code written is roughly 10 to 1. Most days, the actual task is opening a file someone wrote three years ago, working out what it does and making it better without breaking the 400 lines around it.