ForrestKnight on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Orientation · Explorer · Lesson 1 of 98 · 14 min video, then about 30 min of practice
What software engineers actually do all day
After this you can describe a realistic working week for a software engineer and say which parts of it appeal to you and which do not.
Why it matters
The picture most people carry, a lone genius typing fast, is wrong in ways that matter for whether you will enjoy this. Most of the week is spent reading existing code, understanding a problem well enough to change something safely, reviewing other people's changes, writing things down and talking to colleagues about trade-offs. Focus on the boring parts when you watch: meetings, code review, debugging someone else's code, waiting on CI. If those sound tolerable or even satisfying, that is a better signal than enjoying the idea of building apps. Trap: day-in-the-life videos are often lifestyle content. Watch for what the person actually works on, not the coffee.
How to use this resource
From 2021 but still the most honest breakdown of the real work: reading code, meetings, reviews, debugging. Nothing in it has dated.