[kika]

There's no such thing as "software development". It's like "math" - a very broad term. If you're getting good scores at engineering and math, you definitely could switch to development, you just need to ask yourself what exactly do you want to do? Code a complicated web app, write a network stack for realtime OS, implement complex 3D graphics algorithm on current 3D hardware, write embedded code for the next "Tea kettle with SNMP monitoring" project on Kickstarter or something else? These are quite different skills, these projects go at a very different paces, require different approaches and so on. You can do very well financially on each and every of them, but you need to like what you do, programmers rarely can get away with 9-to-5 thinking about code and 5-to-9 thinking about women, sports or beer. If you're a good programmer you're thinking about efficient priority queue implementation even when you watch superbowl.