Introduction
My name is Rohit Khattar, and I am originally from India. I grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and lived there until I graduated from high school. I am a slightly geeky software engineer with a passion for cooking and reading fantasy and sci-fi novels.
My career has taken a lot of twists and turns that have led me to the ever-evolving world of software engineering. I got my bachelor's degree in civil engineering from The Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar (India). However, I was always interested in software engineering, and I was fortunate to visit Idaho State University for a couple of months in the summer of 2012. During this summer internship, I developed a web application (PHP) used by on-field hydrologists and water engineers. This internship helped me see the possibility of combining my civil engineering knowledge with my passion for software engineering and web development and proved to be a major turning point in my career. After finishing my Bachelor’s, I was offered a Master’s position at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) in the Civil Engineering department with a focus on developing GIS applications for civil engineers. This once again helped me gain valuable software experience as well as utilize my civil engineering skills and knowledge and turn them into useful software products.
I went on to work as a professional software engineer after graduating from BYU where I primarily worked on backend technologies including Node.JS and NoSQL databases. It was a seamless experience to transfer my problem-solving skills from my civil engineering background into software engineering. I have always held the belief that anyone who is willing can learn software development and it no longer is an exclusive realm that is limited to only a select few. It was validating to see that principle in action with not only myself but other interns and junior employees at my work. I worked at this position for 3 years before going back to school for a PhD in Civil Engineering and a master's in information technology simultaneously.
In 2021 I started full time work with my current organization, CHG Healthcare. During my last few years at school my major projects revolved around cloud technologies and migrating on premise applications to the cloud. The world of cloud technology is the future, and every major software and web application now runs on the cloud instead of local machines or data servers. I immersed myself in learning and mastering various aspects of the cloud infrastructure world and that is what I currently do at my job as a Sr. Software Engineer at CHG Healthcare. I primarily handle their cloud infrastructure for their web applications with over 70,000 clients. My job duties range from ensuring all systems are always up and running, expanding our current cloud infrastructure to fit the needs of our clients as well as performing major platform and architecture upgrades to our web applications.
Software Engineering Fellow
career options
The world of software engineering is extremely diverse and constantly changing with the advent of innovative technologies and tools. This diversity offers countless opportunities for you to find a role that suits your taste and areas of interest.
Software Engineering Fellow
skills
What are the main hard skills you use on a daily basis in your current job?
Writing, debugging, and maintaining code in different languages/frameworks including Node.JS, TypeScript, MySQL. A deep understanding of programming patterns that are common in the industry helps one write readable, less prone to errors and robust code. These skills have been developed and acquired through the last 13 years of software engineering expertise including school projects, master's thesis and PhD dissertations, and professional software development in the industry.
Understanding of various networking principles such as internet protocols (TCP/IP), Routing, Firewalls and gateways is critical to creating and managing web-based applications. Communication standards including REST APIs, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP etc. comprise of a major component of what the users of a web application employ to connect to the application. I learnt these skills over the years as a Backend engineer responsible for developing REST APIs and various networking classes during college.
IaC is a way to manage and provision computing infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. It is a key practice in DevOps that allows developers to focus on building applications instead of managing infrastructure. I was introduced to IaC as a part of a cloud fundamentals course during my graduate program and I use it daily on a very heavy basis. It enables me to develop and maintain our cloud infrastructure to the highest levels of industry standards.
What are the main soft skills you use on a daily basis in your current job?
This skill is practically required in any job or career that one may choose, but if one wants to excel in the world of software engineering, problem solving skills will be their sharpest tool. The ability to see the big picture, understand the overall goal and break that down into manageable chunks is something that I need to do every day and with every task. This is not a skill that a single class or course will teach you but is a lifelong learning lesson. Doing simple puzzles, working with recent technologies and software products, and staying up to date with the programming world helps me improve my problem-solving skills.
When working on large problems that businesses must tackle, they will be split up into subtasks that will be worked on in groups. Being able to communicate technical concepts clearly with one's peers is a particularly important skill to master. Leadership and professional teamwork classes at BYU helped me learn these skills as well as a couple books that I believe made a significant impact: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Crucial Conversations.
There will always be more work to be done at a big organization. Compared to a college level workload, once you are done with your set of tasks, your work does not necessarily end. Furthermore, most large software corporations are streamlined to extract as much productivity from their engineers as possible. This makes it important for one to prioritize tasks, manage workloads, and meet project deadlines by efficiently allocating time to various development tasks and responsibilities. I have gained these skills during my college years as well as my previous jobs.
Rohit
’s personal path
Tell us about your personal journey in
Software Engineering Fellow
:
Navigating the job market, specifically for a person like me who graduated with a civil engineering degree and wanted to pursue a career in software engineering was always going to be tricky. And I understood this fact while doing my master's at BYU. So, to prepare myself I took extra classes that were not required by my program but related to software development, computer science and web application architecture. These classes instilled important foundational skills for a career in software engineering and provided a validation to the hiring managers that I studied for this career and possessed the required knowledge and skills. One tricky aspect of finding a job in this field is that you are often filtered by technical recruiters who do not have the full grasp and understanding of the roles they are trying to fill. I was fortunate to come across a technical consulting firm who often provided strong candidates to various companies that were looking to hire in my field. They were able to help me format and present my resume in a way that caught the attention of the recruiters for each position that I was applying for. I did face a lot of rejections from companies that only wanted graduates from a computer engineering background and in hindsight that was a good thing for my career to not be hired by such a company.
My current employer was one of the few companies that looked beyond just the title of my degree and understood the skills and knowledge I had amassed during my master’s and PhD degrees. The first round of interviews was with their recruiting manager followed by an online technical assessment. Performing well in that technical assessment proves to your recruiters that you do have the required skills for the job. This was followed by an interview with the managerial team that was hiring for this position and finally a round of intensive technical interviews with the senior software engineers and architects on my current team. Paying close attention to the job requirements and preparing yourself for questions related to that is what really helped me stand apart from the other applicants and being accepted into this position.
What would you tell your younger you regarding building your current career?
Explore each and every opportunity you find. That free seminar on a topic that seems sort of interesting, go for it. College and youth are times where we have the freedom to explore various paths and find something we are passionate about. For me it was programming and software development. I found that out when I was 13 and since then I have not looked back. I did take an extraordinarily long time to get to a job that I enjoy doing. Once you find something you are passionate about, do not give up on it easily. I came close to giving up on software development many times either due to not finding the right job or not having enough opportunities because of my background and I would go back to my younger self and tell him to stay strong and not give up. Because I did meander that cost precious years in my career. So, in short, explore every opportunity until you find the one that you are passionate about. And once you do, give it your absolute best.
Final thoughts & tips
I am a strong believer in the fact that one makes their own luck. Yes, there will be circumstances that will be beyond your control that will affect you directly or indirectly but at the end of the day all that matters is your passion and determination. Good things will happen though we might not realize why they are good for us at the time. I have had a whirlwind of a journey to finally get to a job and career that I am excited to work on each day and I am not stopping here. There is so much to explore and so much more to learn and having that spirit will help you be happy and impactful in your career, whether it's in software engineering or anything else.
Resources to dig in more
Introduction to Node JS
A quick dive into Node JS and how it works
Getting started with AWS Cloud
Quick guide to get started with cloud using Amazon Web Services
Terraform Tutorials
Set of tutorials that explain and implement IaC concepts
