EE major here, expecting to graduate in 2024. I’ll have to admit that I’m only here because I wasn’t admitted to the CS program and I’ve mostly been paying attention to trends in the software development industry, so please pardon my ignorance. My country (Sweden) has a great software industry but the hardware design and manufacturing industry isn’t nearly as strong. The advice I get is that EE has great career prospects in semiconductors, IC design, microelectronics and defense, but most of these positions will require relocation which I’m not interested in. I’m clueless about RF and power systems, and besides, the compensation tends to be worse than the previously mentioned industries.
Currently, I’m grinding the “self-taught programmer” stuff, taking CS classes and doing IT jobs to get the experience for a full-time dev role. The CS bubble burst didn’t affect my country that much because we didn’t have overinflated salaries and excessive expansion during the pandemic. Would there still be good prospects in EE if I choose to focus on it (assume passion for CS is negligible), or would it be a better idea to keep going with CS?
The cloud servers aren’t nearly as impressive as that, it’s actually because I don’t have admin access to my apartment’s router and can’t start a real homelab! I’m surprised to hear that an IT-adjacent internship locked you out of CS roles (but I don’t know how it’s like in a highly competitive market). I would have thought that the software industry is moving towards combining software dev and operations into one role, or forming teams where both roles work very closely and take responsibilities off each other, so having experience on one side and studying up on the other would give you an advantage.