Before I start explaining the issue I need to stress that I'm trying to be honest and open, so please don't consider me arrogant or so.
So I'm a recent master graduate in computer science from a very reputable German research Uni. I was just offered a job at a German software company as a software developer, actually I don't know any job that is close to CS studies other than that. This is my first time ever in the industry and I didn't know anything about it before I attended 3 days at the company to see how the job looks. Now that I will be working at the company I've noticed something very odd. I noticed that the majority of the people there don't have CS degrees, although they are all very experienced and professionals as software developers.
To be honest I figured out this just by our discussions over lunch. They didn't mention that, but the discussions we had and the their way of thinking made it very clear to me that they are just professionals not academics. Then when I returned home I googled and it was correct.
After I saw that I started to actually think if I really fit into the team or not. Of course as people they are very nice and as developers they are also very professionals and good. But there is still this odd thing that I don't know how to explain which makes me feel that I'm different from them.
The masters teach you to learn things pretty quickly and I feel that in one or maximum two years I will be as good as our team leader. I feel that I will be good in a "principled" way. I don't know how to explain this to you! Probably an 'engineering approach' is the correct term here.
I always thought that my future job will involve working in a team with real engineers working on solving an engineering issue in CS. Something like making a system scale to huge amount of data or so, that would require: research, trying things out, working with engineers who are competent in math and research, and then at the end program the solution. I haven't started working yet, so I don't know how it will go. The team leader also knows what interests me because he asked me about it and i told him that I like challenging things. I mentioned the scaling example but not the steps I imagine for buidling it.
I was a little depressed about this, but then I found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt79JcPfZQA
I saw that this girl is the same. Graduated from a very good Uni but now is working on web development!
My questions to you:
1- Is this really the industry?
2- Is there any job in the industry that is close to academia? Or close to what I explained in my scaling example?
3- Is my frustration normal thing for a recent graduate?
4- What are the titles for R&D jobs? And can I get to them with my masters? The reason I didn't do a PhD is that because I saw most of PhD holders end up as software engineers, so I thought it's better to start now and gain experience in the industry rather than academia if I will end up there anyway.