Some key perspectives that highlight the difference between upcoming software engineers and established ones is that the more established ones tend to perceive their code from the angle of performance, reliability, efficiency and maintainability.
Upcoming software engineers tend to be relieved their code works, however, there's more to software engineering than a code that compiles especially because the clients judge a good program by how fast it processes, how rarely it crashes and how nice the updates are. All of the above can't be guaranteed unless a software engineer takes the road less traveled in pursuit of the noble ideology of making things better.
Ultimately the pursuit of better will improve on your skillset, you'll break a lot of things and more importantly you'll find out why some things break. Careerwise you'll grow a lot faster when you create the impression that your solutions are dependable.