You're assuming that value is measured only in dollars. But surely, someone who is more interested in solving mechanical engineering problems than programming would be happier with a mechanical engineering job than a programming job, even if the salary is lower.

You're assuming that the degree has anything to do with the work. The vast majority of things I've been paid to do in the course of my life have had little to do with the subjects of my degrees. That said, because I have a bachelor's in English and master's in Math Education and Fiction Writing (two separate degrees, not one weird interdisciplinary one), there are fields that I cannot hope to break into. No one will hire me to be their chemist or auto mechanic with my credentials. Programming is probably the easiest field for someone with no paper credentials to get into out of all the highly paid careers.

>But surely, someone who is more interested in solving mechanical engineering problems than programming

And this is why I went the way that I did. Unfortunately, I'm from what's practically extreme poverty in the U.S., I'm sure a large amount of Mech and Elec EE's (or engineers in general) aren't exactly from upper class wealth...

And, guess what. I'm young, the planet is on fire and only getting worse, and it's beyond obvious that nothing is going to change that within my lifetime. That's a singular of many issues. The only way to insulate yourself from a lifetime of suffering from this is by money, and lots of it. Definitely not with what even senior ME's or EE's make.

To imagine a young student would choose to go one route because it's fun or their passion instead of a route that will somewhat secure their future at this point is asinine, and it's going to completely fuck industry over (as if it's not already) when there's a lack of capable engineers in other disciplines than SWE

And the way things are going with everything becoming subscription including the recent push to normalize the idea of everyone becoming permanent renters, the actual cost of a middle-class living is outpacing wages for pretty much everyone that makes below SWE-equivalent salaries. The squeezing of the middle class is just slowly ratcheting up a few percent every year.

If you're young enough a good Mech eng is much better preparation for the nasty world you reasonably can fear is around the corner 30 to 40 years from now.

100%. My wife works in a lab with masters level ME's that make less than half of what I do as a self taught engineer with a liberal arts BA. It's insanity. SpaceX salary data is awesome for this -- on average the SWEs are the highest compensated when the other engineers are doing actual rocket science.

I went SWE and I'm p**ed that Mechanical Engineering pays 2.5 less. It destroys the know-how basis of this country, if not the world. Might as well call it the Tech Disease, modeling upon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease.

You can be pissed off, but make sure you're pissed off at your employer for not paying you more rather than fellow engineers for earning more.

Yes, this is the case.

Controversial, so I'm expecting downvotes.

SWE is one of the most difficult professions at the highest levels. If it's so simple, then the ready supply of SWE should depress wages but that is clearly not happening.

This is true but a SWE doesn’t need to have a high level to make a lot more money than other types of engineers.

While SWE may be a very difficult and brain intensive profession at the highest level, so are so many other technical/STEM fields. Yet curiously it's SWE that gets the big bucks, not the other fields.

Sure, I can agree with this.

The issue is that 99% of senior other engineering professions top out at like, $160-$175k at most.

You can be fresh out of college, go to an absolutely entry level junior SWE job, and make $250k.

There lies the issue.

I would also argue EE is more difficult at the highest than SWE. There's some deeply rooted knowledge, logic, and physics required, whereas in SWE... at the highest levels, you can almost pave your own damn path however you choose to and make things work.

While I’m sure there’s a fresh college grad SWE making $250K first-year somewhere, I’d be shocked if the median were over $150K and surprised if the median was $100K or more in the US.

While it seems easy to us, that's survivor bias. Turns out not everybody can learn to program well enough to do it for money.

I'd venture that 90% of folks who are able to get a physical engineering degree and get a job doing engineering work would be able to learn programming well enough to get paid for it.

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

The studies for ME or EE are hard, but are those jobs harder? SWEs handle ungodly amounts of complexity, trying to build and keep running a system based on poorly documented libraries, shitty third-party services, code that was written a long time ago and no one understands it, backcompat requirements, availability and scalability requiremets etc. etc. There's a ton of stuff to juggle in your mind, whereas an EE or ME can just work on button for a car cockpit or something.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's all about timing. Electrical engineers were some of the highest paid and most in-demand engineers from the late 80s to around 2007 or so, due to the explosive growth of quantitative finance and synthetic investment vehicles, and the fact that only physics and EE educations were providing the type of skillset in stochastic process modeling you need to do that kind of thing. Then the bubble burst when global credit markets crashed and it turned out a lot of it was castles being built on sand.

Software engineering is in a similar bubble right now thanks to gigantic influxes of VC cash trying to will future monopolies into existence, or at least convince the public markets at some point they've got a decent shot so they can cash out on exit, by undercutting service prices and overpaying developers to keep them from working anywhere else.

Whether it lasts or also comes crashing down we'll see, but historically, every bubble has tended to burst eventually. It's kind of hard to know in advance what the next one will be, especially as a teenager when you're still in a position to tailor your life's educational and career plans to trying to be inside of it when it happens.

I agree, I studied mechanical and then aerospace engineering. While these are still the kind of problems that interest me the most, on one side I regret not having gone to software. The salary difference is just too large to ignore, as well as the possibilities of full remote working.

Hey, don't think you're alone. I'm currently studying chemical engineering and I share the same feelings with you about low salaries. The thing that keeps me going is maybe I can break into management one day. Also my engineering degree is very fungible.

Go work for one of the CAD or FEA companies and start learning to write software. It will take a few years of effort to make the transition, but then you should be able to move.

Some of the best sw developers I've known have been mechanical, civil and chemical engineers by degree.

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