Becoming a Software Engineer

Software engineering is mostly reading, not writing. Most working engineers spend more time understanding code someone else wrote, and why it was written that way, than producing new lines of their own. The job advertisements do not say this, and it is the single biggest gap between what people expect and what the work is.

The second gap is that the difficulty is rarely technical. Deciding what to build, agreeing on it with people who want different things, and shipping it without breaking what already works, is harder than any algorithm you will be asked about in an interview.

In Botswana specifically, the market splits into three: in-house teams at banks, insurers, mobile operators, government and the parastatals; agencies and consultancies serving clients abroad; and remote roles contracted directly with foreign employers. They pay differently, teach differently, and want different things from a junior.

It is also a small market, and worth sizing before you plan a career around it. Information and communication employed 6,043 people at the last official count, which is 0.8% of everyone in work. The detail is in the size of the ICT sector.

A typical week is less code than most people expect. Roughly: a day of actual feature work, a day of reviewing other people's changes and responding to reviews of your own, a day of investigating something that broke or is about to, and the rest in planning, unblocking others and writing things down.

Junior engineers are usually surprised by how much of the job is asynchronous writing. The engineers who progress fastest are the ones who can describe a problem clearly in a message.

The skills that get people hired and the skills people study are not the same list. Employers screen for one language done properly, evidence that you can work in an existing codebase, and the ability to explain a decision.

What is assumed rather than tested: Git, the command line, and enough of how the web works to debug a request. Candidates lose offers on these far more often than on algorithms.

A portfolio of three finished, deployed things beats twelve half-built ones. Finished means someone other than you can use it without instructions from you.

What a reviewer is actually checking: does this person write code another human can maintain, do they handle the unhappy path, and can they explain why they built it this way. A clear README does more for you than a second project.

• One project solving a problem you actually had
• One contribution to an existing codebase, however small
• A README on each explaining the decisions, not just the setup

Junior roles here cluster in a few places, and the employers are few enough to be learned by name: the technology teams at the banks and insurers, the mobile operators, government and the parastatals, agencies doing client work, and the business-process operations that have set up in Gaborone. Remote junior roles exist but are much harder to win without a track record.

Worth knowing before you apply: Information and Communications Technicians are among the ten occupations with the most unemployed graduates on the official count, and the number more than doubled in two quarters. The figures and their source are in how many graduates Botswana produces. This is a field with more qualified entrants than openings, which changes how much a credential alone will do for you.

The practical route most people take is agency or consultancy work first, because those teams hire for potential and expose you to many codebases quickly. See getting paid from abroad for the path after that.

Five years in, the question is whether you go deeper or wider. Deeper means a specialism, usually infrastructure, data or a domain like payments. Wider means moving toward product or management.

The most common mistake is taking a management role because it is the only promotion offered. See why most people become managers before they are ready.

Engineering interviews here vary far more than the internet suggests. Local employers and agencies mostly run a practical exercise plus a conversation about your past work. Remote employers are more likely to run structured algorithmic rounds.

• Be able to walk through one project in detail, including what you would do differently
• Practise talking while coding; silence reads as being stuck
• Ask what the first ninety days look like, and what would make them go badly