Software Engineer Review

I am a software engineer - the actuality of the role varies depending on which project I'm placed on. Personally I would describe myself as a web developer by specialty, but at present I am doing Selenium automated testing.

Was taught C# in the initial three months, since then I've learnt a few more things but on my own time, not as a result of the company teaching me. There's not much training provided while on the job.

It really depends on when you asked me - if you'd have asked me in October/November when I was doing front-end dev, I was loving every minute of it. Now, with the testing arrangement I kind of dread coming to work. Wildly variable and I'm really on the fence about it.

Not massively at the moment, I recently raised a lot of queries about the direction of my career and felt largely ignored - sometimes it feels like I've been taken on to the program just to fill jobs that nobody wants, not to actually develop myself.

God knows, it's all over the place. The work seems bizarrely nebulous and the QA apprenticeship bits are kind of a mess. I have absolutely no handle on what I'm expected to do by QA.

My QA assessor is a lovely person and is always happy to listen to any concerns I have - I have a lot of negativity about the way the QA course is structured, but as far as support from my QA contacts it's amazing, couldn't ask for more.

It varies - certain people are fantastic, but my immediate management seem a little bit detached from my issues - I was paying my own expenses out of pocket for the longest time because the company couldn't sort my amex and my line manager didn't even seem to care when I said "hey, I've run out of money, what can I do?"

I'm sure it'd meet my costs perfectly if I was a sensible person, but I'm not so I struggle all the time. I am very aware that the remuneration is extremely good considering the amount of degrees I don't have.

I'm not really sure what's intended by this question, it's quite nebulous but I'm regularly sent emails asking if I'll go and volunteer to help out with careers events and go into schools and such like, which I always turn down. So I'm not sure really, it's not something I'm interested in.

Yes

For all the bad, they saved me when I was at my absolute lowest and I am incredibly happy with that - for all the little niggles and various complaints I'm getting paid and it's not completely awful.

Be firm with your resource manager, don't just accept projects without getting a good idea of what the job is before you're sent to them. It can turn out incredibly grim.