[erichmond]

> SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my > mind

I won't touch on any of the other points, but I'd repeat something I've said to many junior engineers over the years.

I'd agree that the barrier to entry to SWE is probably lower. There's a ton of work where you just need anyone with two hands and a brain to smash their fingers into the keys until someone's idea is realized, but to get to the upper echelon of the field, it's at a minimum on par with any of the other engineering fields out there.

[tialaramex]

Because programming is meta-applicable (programmers write software that writes software and this recurses indefinitely, whereas good luck building a new type of bridge that can build bridges, let alone recursively) you'd naively expect this to top out really quickly.

But instead you can get a good job doing things the machine could certainly do, and do better, but doesn't yet because nobody yet taught a machine how. It's unclear how long that will last, but it may well be enough that everybody reading HN has retired before it's over. At the beginning of my career printf("This %p is %d a %s bad %n idea\n") didn't produce a compile error. In 2020 the C++ Standard Library specification still didn't say that the equivalent mistake was a compile error (but in 2021 they retrospectively fixed the 2020 standard to say it is), and I'd say this is now the middle of my career.

Progress has been slow is what I'm suggesting.