Main Responsibilities of a Software Engineer at an Advertising Company
Tristan's main responsibilities as a software engineer center on "communication, contribution, and caretaking," encompassing daily team interactions ("agile standups, retrospectives, sprint planning"), algorithm development and data mapping ("A to B mapping," such as translating website requests for a gift card vendor), and ensuring code maintainability and system stability, highlighting the crucial role of collaboration and problem-solving in preventing production failures.
Communication, Teamwork, Coding, Problem-Solving, Software Development
Advizer Information
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Company
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Tristan Hilbert
Software Engineer
Advertising Company
Major: Computer Science
Loyola Marymount University - Masters : Computer Science
Computer Science
Advertising, Communications & Marketing
Product / Service / Software Development and Management
None Applicable
Video Highlights
1. Effective communication is crucial for collaboration within agile team environments, involving daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
2. Software engineers apply their programming skills to solve real-world problems, often involving data mapping and algorithm implementation.
3. Maintaining clean, well-structured code is essential for long-term project maintainability and minimizing disruptions, highlighting the importance of testing and debugging skills.
Transcript
What are your main responsibilities within your current role?
I developed three Cs: communication, contribution, and caretaking. As a software engineer and individual contributor, you learn that communicating with your team is your primary responsibility.
You have daily agile standups, or multiple times a week, where you discuss what you're doing, what you're planning to do, and how you're accomplishing your goals. There are also retrospectives and sprint planning, allowing us to tackle tasks as a team and collaborate. This also involves talking to stakeholders, managers, and whoever else is needed.
Contribution is something many coders look forward to. That's where you end up programming a lot of the algorithms you learned in school. Many jobs involve a form of A to B mapping, where you take one piece of data and translate it into another.
For example, I had to write something that took requests from our website and relayed them to a gift card vendor. The vendor's data format was different from our website's, so I mapped the data from one to another.
Finally, there's caretaking. As we work together, it's important to have well-styled, maintainable code, so that if the business needs to switch gears, it's easy to do. It's also about ensuring things are working correctly. I can't count the times I've messed something up that went into production, breaking things or causing our site to go down for hours. We then had to work together to get it back up and running. There's a lot of learning through all of that, which is also important.