Author: Michael Pham November 21 2025
This is an educational blog for students at James Martin High School to learn about the software industry during the STEMX 2025 event. Instead of a slide deck presentation, this is an outline with the complete contents of our talk on one page.
- Sign In Sheet
- What I do as an IT professional
- How I got here
- Licensure
- Job Outlook
- Everything Else
- Tips, Links, and Resources
To record your name on the sign in sheet, sign up on Github, learn how to use git and Github, then send me a pull request! I will monitor this account for the rest of 2025 and accept your pull requests for the README.md file. You can find the repository on Github at https://github.com/stemx2025/stemx2025.github.io
Faculty Sponsors:
Mrs. Meribah Treadway
Mr. Joshua Ogg
Classroom Host:
Mr. Marcus Blanchard
Guest Speaker :
Mr. Michael Pham
Student Attendees :
Tuyet Do
Ryan (@whatwareweb)
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As a software developer at an electronics distributor, I maintain software for the company's internal computer systems that manage our inventory, compliance, ordering system, and much more.
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My day-to-day can change depending on the current project.
- For experiments, I may spend 4 or 6 or even all 8 hours of my normal work day writing and troubleshooting code.
- For normal business projects I spend about:
- Half of my time analysing requirements, analysing code, and planning. This includes design and design review with teammates.
- A quarter of my time gathering information for the next business project
- A quarter of my time on producing actual technical results.
- In medium sized to large corporations, half of the work is managing the work, and gathering consensus on plans.
- For special case or emergency situations, I am on the clock until the incident is resolved. This has only happened about 5 times in my 8 years of experience. My managers are responsible for rotating our shifts so that the people working an incident stay well rested.
- I started working at my current employer through an online resume application on Indeed with no referral. I went in blind and impressed enough team members in 4 hours of interviews. Interestingly, the job posting was 8 months old, which meant they were having trouble finding candidates or had a lot of openings (I simply asked at the end of my interview, and both were true).
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The software industry or IT industry is not a licensed profession. "Engineer" is a protected term and it is not correct to call a software professional an engineer.
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There are many certifications out there for software.
- My personal opinion of them is that you are better off learning at your own pace.
- That said, certain cloud certifications like Kubernetes, AWS, or GCP opens a lot of doors.
- If your job needs you to work on AWS, learn AWS. If you need general devops knowledge, learn devops.
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On this subject, I cannot provide more accurate information than the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook.
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In software development roles, the projected job growth from 2024 to 2034 is 267k jobs, or 15%. This is the fastest growing sector related to STEM, by-volume. For comparison, the next highest by-volume are 166k jobs for Registered Nurses (5%) and 82k jobs for Data Scientists (34%).
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College degree (4-year degree at an accredited college)
- Tedious, math intensive, but the most common path.
- You will compete with other fresh high school graduates and build a network with your study groups.
- This opens the most doors.
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Trade school degree/coding bootcamp/career programs.
- These tend to come with job placement programs.
- You will compete with all sorts of people and build a network with them.
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Self teaching.
- A rare, difficult path.
- The very best coders I have met have learned this way. This is also how you go from junior to mid-level to senior, after employment.
- Without a network of old classmates to lean on from college, nor a job placement program, you will need to build your own network to open doors for you.
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Read documentation and plan your code.
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Write documentation so others can follow exactly what you did.
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Understand programming patterns.
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Understand programming paradigms. Do schools still teach Object Oriented Programming?
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Avoid accidental success.
- The best junior coders are deliberate.
- Take the time to understand exactly what you need to change and why.
- Don't blindly change things to see if it works, without a hypothesis.
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The tech industry changes very fast. For example, in the smartphone space:
- The first iPhone release was 2007.
- Samsung and Blackberry were still making slider phones in 2010.
- Windows Phone released in 2010, an attempt by Microsoft to overtake Apple and Google in the smartphone market (they did not succeed). They still managed to salvage the Windows Phone UI in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 before giving up on that UI style.
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Keep a sharp eye on quality, and learn to have good taste.
Understand other programming languages, their paradigms, scripting languages, markup languages, etc.
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It's 2025. The paradigm of OOP has faded and is considered old news.
- But it was a big deal for a reason!
- Understand how and why OOP came about, the problems it tried to solve, and the new problems it introduced.
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Python is the second best at everything.
- Easy to learn, which means it's easy to mis-use.
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Learn how to interact with a terminal. In Windows, that's the command line or Powershell.
- Most modern tech infrastructure is on some form of Unix or Linux.
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Learn how to read and write shell, bash, or Powershell scripts.
- As your mastery grows, you will eventually no longer be a junior coder led by another team member. You'll be mentoring the next junior hire!
- This means you cannot neglect leadership skills or presentation skills. This goes double for those not seeking a college degree.
- These kinds of skills can take years to cultivate.
- You will likely be promoted up before that happens, so prepare for this early.
- In college, this means finding like-minded students to form a study group with.
- I mentioned that writing documentation is fundamental. Note that it is an entire career choice for someone who is good at both writing clearly and technical work. Though sometimes you just need the first, depending on the organization.
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There are many different roles and skillsets in the IT industry.
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To name a just a few: Big Tech, industrial software, fintech, scientific research, system administration. There are many others.
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Don't be afraid to talk shop.
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Don't be afraid of failure. Be bold.
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Go into a job fair in your first or second year of college, get embarassed about your 5-minute booth interview going poorly, then take notes for next semester's job fair. Then go again next semester, and the next.
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But did you mean...
- Large Language Models?
- Small Language Models?
- Machine Learning? (Now considered "old school" in less than a decade!)
- Model Context Protocol?
- AI security?
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The landmark Attention Is All You Need paper that led to the explosion LLMs over the past 2 years was published in 2017.
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Leading AI experts like Chip Huyen notes that software developers and data scientists are still dependent on other IT specialists.
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Software ate the world, and it's not clear yet if AI will too.
Tired of hearing about coding and want to get going? Nothing is stopping you from looking it up on Google. Though personally, I recommend w3schools.
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Try looking for tutorials on WSL if you use Windows.
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Try learning about home labs. For the most motivated among us:
- Try learning about a BIOS. Boot a computer in to the BIOS and poke around. Avoid changing anything on your first time.
- Try creating a Linux Boot Medium and install Linux on an old laptop, and plug it into an ethernet cable on your home network router.
- Old equipment costs a lot less on ebay, but the BIOS and documentation are sometimes hard to use on them (I use old Dell thin clients for my home lab and an old gaming computer). Learn how to setup network equipment like an unmanaged switch.
- Buy a website domain and learn to fiddle with Linux to host video game server software for your friends.
- This one's a great way to learn because now you have legitimate users, and a million bots around the world probing your server for vulneratbilies to break in.
- Pick a good domain registrar like Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc.
- Learning via a homelab isn't free. Plan to budget $200 in startup costs and $50 a month to add tools, upgrades, and new equipment. Keep an eye out for services that provide free tiers or lifetime licenses that you will actually use. Don't forget about your internet data usage and your power utility usage. Read the label on those power cables, though in most cases they rearely hit even half their rated capacity.
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roadmap.sh: A complete list of everything about computing that you can learn. This includes the usual technical roles, but also roles like business analysts, video game developers, AI security analysts red-teaming, and more.
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Pragmatic Progammer: Great book. I suggest reading this right before graduating college. Worth having on your shelf to lend to mentees.
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O'reilly Book recommendations: For advanced readers. This is a recommended reading list that I send to my professional colleagues. Pragmatic Programmer is only the first book in the list.