What's your job about?
Honeywell is a multinational conglomerate that produces a wide range of commercial and consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a variety of industries, including aerospace, building technologies, safety and productivity solutions, and performance materials and technologies. Software engineers within Honeywell can work in a multitude of business units to design, develop, test, and maintain software systems and applications for a variety of these industries.
As I am within the Honeywell Process Solutions division my team works on software products used in industrial plants all over the world. These can range from SCADA systems used to control and monitor sensors to enterprise web applications that perform data analysis on the plant. As a software engineer, my responsibilities include iterating through the software lifecycle on these products while also collaborating with cross-functional teams, analysing user requirements, identifying and addressing technical issues, and keeping up with the latest trends and technologies in the field.
Our team’s strengths lie in their expertise in full-stack web development and their capacity to build products from the ground up that remain maintainable and customizable for the best user experience.
What's your background?
I lived overseas in France and then the US during most of elementary and some of the high school. Having classes like History, Math, and Science taught in French made me pick up the language quickly and I maintained it through the rest of school and university. It was an amazing opportunity that was one of my motivations to join a global company like Honeywell that has opportunities to travel.
When I graduated from high school I went to university and studied for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in communications and law. Upon finishing, I worked in communications for a not-for-profit organization. Then with the pandemic, I took the time lockdowns gave as an opportunity to upskill. Having never been through a computer science course at school I took one online and it opened my perspective on what my interests were. I took a diploma in IT before deciding to fully shift directions.
I enrolled in a Bachelor of Computing majoring in software engineering which was challenging and a lot of work, but I always felt engaged and got a lot of enjoyment out of the units. I secured internships before third year, which helped give me perspective on the day-to-day tasks of different roles in the industry. My goal had been Honeywell after researching the available software engineering positions for graduates. The problems we face are challenging, but always interesting, and the people we work with are some of the most knowledgeable in the field.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, since my background is abnormal in of itself having transitioned from communications to a technical role it is very achievable. Some of the most important skills in software engineering are attention to detail and a passion to constantly learning and improving. As technology constantly evolves it’s important to keep up with the latest tools on offer and see ways in which they can be applied to the products offered by our team. If you are intrinsically motivated to build solutions to everyday problems through software or find improvements in existing ones, you can build off this drive regardless of where you are technical.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
I love the opportunity to learn about new technology and apply it within the product I am working on to create a new feature, improve performance, or add to the user experience. The feeling of being challenged with a task that has not yet been implemented before and finding a solution is the most rewarding part of my role and one of the coolest things in general in software engineering. As an example, our team recently leveraged a new feature released in our tech stack to begin research into bleeding-edge web development to improve delivery time and increase scalability.
What are the limitations of your job?
I think you must be comfortable with being in front of a computer for most of the day. Software engineering has a huge element of teamwork. We do daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, PRs, and pair programming where we are in constant collaboration with each other. However, at times these activities can be exclusively online. Remote work has allowed greater flexibility in people’s day-to-day lives but does lead to social interactions being moved to the screen.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...
The first piece of advice would be to push yourself out of your comfort zone. This could be choosing a unit whose focus you’ve never done before or joining a university club where you don’t know anyone. I may have saved myself some time if I tried a computer science elective during my first degree. Then in terms of joining a club, I know without the friends I made through the Computer Science Students Association at Curtin, the course wouldn’t have been as enjoyable. The last two pieces of advice are to be proactive in finding work experience whenever you can and work on personal projects.