[embeng4096]

I think you could be a lot more charitable to EEs and MEs.

The EE/ME equivalent of what you're talking about for SWEs is not "work on button for a car cockpit or something" -- it's hardware/software/enclosures for things like space-hardened applications and payloads, industrial and commercial applications, or medical devices. Some of these are hellishly complex systems, others are just hellishly out of date, over-budget, poorly documented, and "shitty third-party [i.e. lowest-bidding contractor] services".

If you want to tell an EE or ME to just go work on buttons for a car cockpit, you might as well go tell an SWE that they can just go write AJAX calls to update HTML elements on a page, or update Wordpress plugins for businesses.

The electrical and mechanical engineering fields have far advanced past "button for a car cockpit" into much more complex domains, just like SWE has advanced far past writing vanilla JS to update HTML elements into things like JS frameworks, containers, (P/I/S)aaS.

[burntoutfire]

I've read about an ME who has spent 6 years designing air ventilation for seats 40-80 in some Boeing plane... Are such jobs rare? They seem much more constrained and with much less moving parts than modern server-side software.

[s5300]

This is the equivalent of saying "I know some SWE whos entire job it is to make bright and shiny buttons on web pages to entice old people to click on them for ad revenue, it's all he does and he makes bank for it"

You don't particularly seem to have the best grasp on the breadth of a career in ME/EE

Furthermore... if you're going to give an example, please don't make it one of the most beauracratic red taped government jobs program. Yes, we all know what happens at Boeing is not exactly contributing much to society nor giving fulfilling jobs at this point. Entry level Google doesn't particularly do so either, but you can start $200k w/great benefits & all you have to do is have enough accreditation to get thru initial resume screening (which is not much) and then have grinded leetcode for a few months.