I have a bachelor and master of EE. My first job out of college starting my programming career (in Fortran), eventually moving to C and then C++. As my career progressed, I made myself into a software systems engineer. After several years of that, I started taking on full blown systems engineering things which I greatly enjoyed. That started my distancing from software development, mainly from interests but also because I became to expensive to write code. Fortunately, the companies I worked for were willing to support my career goals. YMMV.