Top Programming Languages to Learn

Key Takeaways

in the whole span of software engineering roles if you're looking for the right path for yourself and maybe you're not even sure what all the options are out there you want to watch this video to find out what the paths are and what technical skills you're going to have to focus on as an early engineer at whatsapp and an X engineering manager and the hiring manager at meta I have done hundreds of interviews and thousands of rese reviews and if you've been following my channel you would know that I love to analyze data and look at spreadsheets and all that so with the help of our intern Emma we look that 58 job postings to analyze what are the top five keywords that are listed in the job postings for the most popular roles like AI engineering full stack front end backend and general software engineering roles and at the end of the video I'm going to tell you two roles that are going to be the first roles to be automated and potentially killed by AI these are going to be the first ones to go so stick around until the end but first things first let's talk about these Frankenstein rums so when you're crafting your resum you want to think of it like a restaurant you can be a tourist restaurant with sushi hot hop burger and pizza does that sound like a quality restaurant to you or you can customize your resume ditch all the random skills focus on only the best and IR relevant projects and the key wordss for the role that you're applying to so you want to be like jro the three star Michelin sushi restaurant of the resume and I don't mean you shouldn't learn a variety of skills but I just mean you want to curate the information on your profiles so as a software engineer maybe there are a lot of different things that you could do but if the employers are not looking for everything under the sun you don't need to necessarily tell them that you can do all the other things because it's not actually going to help you land the role I cover this extensively in the ultimate resume handbook I have a chapter on this developing a strategy for targeted resume I'm going to pull just some of the highlights from the book for this video so I'll first start with the top five most popular software engineering careers so let's start with backend engineering I was mainly a backend engineer for most of my career and python was a language that I mostly used I really liked being a backend engineer because I love logic and problem solving more than the visual interface building so this role includes titles like backend software engineer backend developer and anything about infrastructure would be in this category so the top five keywords for this role was number one python 882 % AWS 55% next was java Cloud platforms then containerization so in the book I listed the top 10 keywords so you can check out the book if you're too lazy to do your own research but if you're up for it do the research yourself just go to LinkedIn or whatever job search tool that you use and search the job titles that you want to Target then what I do is I ask chat GPT to pull out the list of keywords for me and put them in a spreadsheet then you just count how many times you see the same keyword over and over divided by the total number of job listings that you have looked at or you can go to my website and pay $20 to get the list whatever works for you next popular rule is front-end engineering these include things like front-end developer front-end software engineer front-end web developer and this is an excellent entry point if you're new to programming because front-end Engineers mainly focus on user experience building buttons and UI and handling all the visual things my first internship was in web I personally really hated it while on the job I learned that I really don't like pushing pixels around so it's a personal choice try it out and see if you like it the top five keywords for front-end Engineers 90% of the job descriptions as for JavaScript big surprise 80% as for react 70% HTML then CSS and angularjs by the way if you want to get the list of the keywords you can go to my website and download a four-page PDF so you can access it anytime next is full stack engineer so this is the combo of the first two you do both back end and front end titles could include things like web developer or full stack developer number one keyword for this category was CSS followed by HTML JavaScript C so you'll notice that the percentages are pretty low here compared to what you saw for example front end engineering roles they wanted 90% wanted JavaScript and backend roles as for python 82% of time so these keywords are all over the place sort of because it covers a broad range of expertise needing diverse skill sets because you need to do front end and back end and that's partly why people say it's easier to start in front end it's more straightforward and less languages to learn and you just know if you know JavaScript there are going to be jobs that you can apply for you will notice a similar pattern with AI engineering roles which I'm going to talk about next right now ai and machine learning is really hot but this role is not for everyone I talked extensively about this in multiple videos already and why you should or shouldn't pursue this role so watch those videos if this is really your thing you're basically going to need a lot of specialized skills and strong math background these are the top five keywords number one is machine learning 69% generative AI large language Which models data management containerization and deep learning and there are also many job posting with just general titles like software engineering it could be junior software engineer entry level software engineer or just general software engineer or software developer there's a wide variety of titles like this and for these rules the top five keywords included number one python was 67% number two was C++ at 50% next was Java and JavaScript followed by data management but other than these top five roles there are plenty of other roles so I'll talk about that next there is mobile engineering and I did not pull the keywords for this role because it's so straightforward you pretty much choose between iOS which is Swift or objective c or Android which is Java this is another really good entry point requiring just one language to get started plus there are tons of Contracting gigs that you can pick up but I personally am not a big fan of this path your projects are going to heavily heavily depend on Apple and Google's newest releases and you know I was an early engineer at whatsapp and every freaking year I'm exaggerating but I need to rebuild a lot of the features and deprecate old ones based on whatever Google and apple decided to do but if you're okay with that it is rewarding with direct impact and visibility as a mobile engineer you'll see directly what you're actually creating and millions of people will use your app directly so seeing your work come to life on users phones can be pretty rewarding if you're okay with the frequent updates another really popular one is gaming or Graphics engineering and I know a lot of people find this world really exciting but the industry is known for long hours and lower pay if you think about it logically Whenever there are more people who really really really want to do something really passionately the competition is really high so companies can get away with paying a little bit less so choose that if you're really passionate about gaming another one is cyber security engineering you are basically safeguarding networks from cyber attacks this is really critical and experiencing a lot of growth but it's another role that's really hard to get into kind of like AI engineering there are almost no Junior roles available in this category you will need highly specialized skills so I wouldn't recommend if if you're you data scientist is another role that's really popular it's all about manipulating data people sometimes get it mixed up with machine learning engineering and an analogy that I can share is imagine if you are a chef who want to create a new signature dish so as a data scientist you would gather the data on different recipes analyze dishes maybe high ratings identify patterns like popular ingredients and much machine learning engineer is more like using this data to build a machine learning model that can predict which new recipes would be successful based on specific ingredients and techniques as a junior engineer you will see more opportunities as a data scientist not so much as a machine learning engineer I did get a request for top salaries in data science so I'm planning on making a video soon okay as promised bonus tips the two fields that are going to be automated and replaced by AI first are devops and QA automation is going to be a major driver of change in the tech industry devops and QA automation tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated helping to automate a lot of repetitive testing tasks previously done by human Engineers AI is not going to replace all jobs all at once overnight right instead it's going to start replacing our tasks one by one and the tasks that are easier to replicate are more repetitive tasks like QA and dead vops and inevitably those are just going to be much easier to replace with artificial intelligence now if you want to learn more about AI taking over our jobs as software Engineers watch this video otherwise YouTube thinks you should watch this one next I'll see you there bye