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I went from ME to CS. It's clear you don't have a clear focus, so I would suggest you think about that a bit more. Whereas software folks think about managing a

I went from ME to CS. It's clear you don't have a clear focus, so I would suggest you think about that a bit more. Whereas software folks think about managing abstractions, engineers think about forces, parts, and tolerances, and whereas software is nice and clean and abstract, in "physical engineering", careful attention needs to be paid to a million "edge" factors: stress, wear, thermal expansion, tolerancing, costing, manufacturing, ESD, chemical durability (corrosion), material selection, and tradeoffs arising from all the above as well as the business managers. The level of expertise required to be "good" is very very deep and compensation is generally much poorer than in SWE.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
> The level of expertise required to be "good" is very very deep This is so true. I was working with an older ME who was nearing retirement. My code was controlling a subsystem he designed and he was going over it with me to figure out how to get the best performance. It was when he showed me that a minor change to the angle of a bracket had a huge impact on reliability that I realized that as much as I enjoyed mechanical design, I was just a dabbler. This guy was demonstrating decades of expertise and would think of things that never occurred to me. I was half his age and was probably already making more than he was.