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Building software & products

Computer Science

Making the apps, websites and systems people use every day.

This suits you if…

You are willing to keep learning for the whole career rather than for the degree, you would rather understand why someone else's code does what it does than write everything from scratch, and you can explain a trade-off to a person who disagrees with you.

Look elsewhere if…

You want a body of knowledge that stays true, or you are choosing this because you were told it guarantees a job. The tools decay every few years, and entry-level hiring is genuinely competitive now. That promise was much stronger a decade ago than it is today.

What the work actually is

What the work is actually like

Less typing than people imagine. A working day is reading existing code to understand why it does what it does, a couple of hours of actual writing, reviewing colleagues' changes, and meetings deciding what is worth building at all. A large share of the job is maintaining and changing software that already exists and that someone else wrote, often years ago.

The catch

The knowledge decays: tools and frameworks you are expert in today are legacy in six years, so you are signing up to keep learning for the whole career. The work is also sedentary and screen-bound, remote roles can be isolating, and entry-level hiring is now genuinely competitive. 'Learn to code and get hired' was true a decade ago and is a weaker promise today.

What people get wrong about it

That it is a solitary job for people who like machines more than people. Past the first year or two, the constraint on your work is almost always communication: explaining a trade-off, disagreeing well in a review, understanding what the person asking actually needs.

The jobs inside this area

  • Software engineer
  • Frontend / backend developer
  • Mobile developer
  • DevOps / platform engineer
  • QA engineer
  • Product manager

A list, not a recommendation. You narrow it, we don’t.

What this kind of work usually offers

Earning well · Making things · IndependenceA generalisation about the sphere, not a promise about a salary. Pay and security vary enormously by country and employer.

How you get there

The one-line version

A CS degree or self-taught: either works if you ship projects. The one thing that matters: write a lot of code.

Stage by stage

  1. While you are still at school

    Write code weekly, on things you personally want to exist. One finished, used, deployed small project teaches more than ten tutorials, and it is also the only evidence anyone can look at.

  2. What you study

    A CS degree gives you the durable half: algorithms, systems, networks, how a computer actually works. Which is the part that doesn't go stale. Self-teaching genuinely works in this field, but it puts the burden of that foundation on you, and visa routes to work abroad usually assume a degree.

  3. How the first years actually go

    You join a team and spend months reading its codebase before you meaningfully change it. First tasks are small bug fixes and tests, deliberately: they are how you learn the system and how the team learns to trust you.

Where this work lives, and how you reach it

What you would study for it

Each says what the first year is really made of, and who should study something else instead.

16 countries · 31 cities · 36 institutions named for this field. Each one states its catch as well as its appeal.

Without leaving home

3 of the routes that need no visa and no move lead into this field.

Test it this month

Free, and finishable in a few evenings

Build one small thing you'll actually use, put it online, and give the link to someone. The distance between 'it works on my machine' and 'a stranger used it' is where the profession lives.

Do the job for an afternoon, before you pick a degree

Employers build these to recruit, which is why they are honest about what the work is. You do the real tasks, unpaid and ungraded, and find out whether you can stand it. Free, no deadline, nothing to win.

  • J.P. Morganabout 4 hours

    Set up a repository, wire a live data feed into a dashboard, and fix what breaks. That is the ordinary week of an engineer inside a bank, not a coding puzzle.

  • Lyftabout 3 hours

    Build and test the back-end pieces a ride app runs on, against the sort of half-specified ticket a real team hands you.

  • Walmartabout 4 hours

    Design the data structures and the shape of a system before writing much of it. This is the part of engineering that decides whether the rest is bearable.

These are on Forage. Search it by the employer’s name — what each one is called changes, and who built it does not.

Open Forage from the catalog

These are ways to try Building software & products before committing to it.