The huge gap between Software Industry experience and self-learning

Intro:

After having experience in both self-learning and working in the software industry, I now feel the huge gap between the two. I now understand why nowadays the market trend is of Experienced folks, every organization wants to hire experienced people. Let me share some practical points on why there is a sky and hell difference between the both.

R&D(Research and Development):

This is the one most important skill which gets developed when we enter a job. During self-learning, we hardly do R&D at that level. Before having some industry experience I hardly used to do so much research and planning that I do now with the team. A lot of time goes into brainstorming the basic structure and the workflow of how the product will work and how to make it more and more efficient.

Going through docs:

This is something everyone misses out on when we do self-learning, even when I used to do self-learning I never went through the docs that much which I do now. I was totally dependent on YouTube videos for learning which should not be the case in Software Development. Even a few days back I was doing development on wxt framework for web extensions, I didn't even get one YouTube video related to this, docs was the option. The habit of understanding through docs is a must in the software development field.

Code Quality and Standards:

The quality of code I write now and I used to write earlier, there is a hell lot of difference. I never used to think of security threats and efficiency measures when I used to do self-learning, now the quality of code matters so much, we have to refactor the code a lot of times before it goes into production.

Version control systems:

Version control systems and tools like Git and GitHub are a must when you join a software industry. The whole team needs to collaborate in a single repository which is achieved by these tools. Raising PRs, merging conflicts, and creating several branches is what makes you industry-ready. Pulling the code from upstream, going back to previous commits to remove the issues is a daily experience for every software engineers.

Debugging:

This is something nobody is unaware of. Debugging debugging debugging, my 70% - 80% of the whole day goes into going through the docs and debugging. Debugging is really an underrated skill, the more you debug faster the more you save time. Nowadays ai tools help a lot but yes debugging is a must skill for the Software Development field.

Concluding:

So I guess now you feel the huge gap between working in industry and self-learning. Those who are struggling with getting their first job, in my opinion they should be well versed with the above points and another thing is, in this tough situation we should not think about the initial salary amount and we should join with even lower packages. Our goal should be to increase it in the long run not caring about the initial salary. I hope everyone does well in the upcoming days and keep hustling!