My dad started teaching me Basic when I was about 7 years old, and since about that age I knew that I wanted to build software for a living. It was obviously a fun and useful thing to do, and something that I could do well. But there is a big — and I mean Grand Canyon-scale BIG — difference between “programming” and working as a professional software engineer.

Here are, in no particular order, some things that nobody told me about working in tech as a software engineer: