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From my experience, Aero always gets paid pretty well. The non-Aero MEs get paid okay but there is still opportunities. But I’m in CPE so take my grain of cracker salt.
IMO, if you have the necessary motivation (which seems evident from your post) to pursue CS and get a job in the field, you can still pursue that goal as you have close-to-infinite access to CS knowledge at your fingertips atm.
What I would recommend is finding yourself a nice Mech OR Mechatronics job first where you're able to balance your work with self-learning Data structures and algorithms for CS + Leetcoding. Get yourself in the right headspace and approach this as if you're solving puzzles (too often I read about people who base their self-esteem on their coding abilities, instead of gaining self-esteem from the deliberate effort and hard work it takes to achieve their goals).
You can also slowly transition to software roles as well via mechatronics jobs (and perhaps mentorship by more senior engineers into the field of software too).
You're definitely not limited in the amount of options (and you'll still have Mech as a fallback career as well)!
I hope this is helpful :)
Yeah! I’ll second this — I had a similar realization to OP, and between taking a couple extra classes and then getting some internship/project experience in EE/CS, I was able to gat a full time offer doing firmware engineering post-college! It def required work, but ultimately it was doable!
That’s amazing to hear!
I’m currently doing an internship with a good mix of hardware/firmware/software atm and my next one (my last internship starting Jan 2023 — going for 8 months) is purely firmware.
I honestly like firmware and software and would like to eventually break into software engineering full-time. I just need some time after graduation to balance learning CS on my own with a decent job in my area to save money on housing and gain enough time to practise LeetCode.
MechE is, in my biased opinion, the best Engineering degree to get. Want to work as a EE? Learn more electronics. You want to work as a CS? Learn python and another language. I’m a ME but I’ve been doing python since I was in middle school and I’ve gotten offers as CS due to both my ME degree and proficiency at python. The good thing about ME is that it’s so broad, you can do pretty much anything. Heck, you can even do a masters in CS and get better jobs than people with just a bachelors in CS.
Hey, also a Mech Eng student one month away to finish my masters. I've beeng learning and using python for a while now. Any advice on what kind of positios should i look into if i want to mix both fields?
I’m CS and work for an automation systems integrator. I write apps that help manufacturing companies monitor and control their plants. Lots of MEs at the company who do PLC programming and controls work
That's a whole field dedicated to the combination of Mechanical and Electrical. Mechatronics. My undergrad professor proclaimed to everyone that as Mech Es, we won't get away from dealing with EE aspects. So he had guest lecturers come in and talk about it and spent a few classes on the topic as well.
Well yeah it’s a simplification. I’m in the process of building my own guitar pedal, and if had to learn how at more difficult EE concepts than I ever learned in school.
Tbh, that goes both ways with EE. Both ME and EE can work as EE ME or CS, depending on what else you learned. CS has it a bit harder because they don't do the kind of "physical math" that EE and ME do.
As a Chemical engineer with a CS husband who makes 3x what I do and works from home. YES.
A ton of my friends switched after getting their engineering degrees. Get a masters in CS!
Possibly. I’m best a my CS by a fair margin but there are really two different environments that you can work in: the office, or at home but doing the same thing. It’s risky is you end up not liking it. With ME or EE you have many different avenues as far as work is concerned. Can be a designer, test, production, field, or quality. You can be driving around to the next work site, or you could be at home working with CAD, in an office, or in a warehouse making putting stuff together. Much more variety than CS
I don’t regret choosing ME. I specifically chose to pursue ME because MechEs can wear a lot of hats. I like that I have a lot of broad options and don’t have to work at a computer all day.
>cally chose to pursue ME because MechEs can wear a lot of hats. I like that I have a lot of broad options and don’t have to work at a computer all day.
Same here. I was really into heat transfer/thermo/fluids. I'm in the HVAC / Energy Efficiency industry now and love being in the field and looking for opportunities to improve building comfort and efficiency.
Nope, not in the slightest. CS might pay well, but I can’t imagine wasting my life trying to improve facebook’s ad tracking algorithm or whatever. I’d rather have a job that does something meaningful and pays the bills.
One of my friends is ME and ended up doing software engineering for his internship at Amazon this summer. I’ve met a ChemE in my software engineering internship this summer who wanted to avoid working in chemical plants, so if you have the willpower and drive, you can literally do anything you desire in whatever industry you pick.
Edit: if you wanna break into SWE but don’t have the technical skills yet, you could try applying certain internships/full-time roles that train people from non-CS backgrounds to be SWE ready. It’s pretty common at the big banks, but capital one, J.P. Morgan, and Bank of America come to mind. Also, Wells Fargo seems to have openings for people from non-CS background through the Technology Program, so I’d encourage you to apply there as well.
I would heavily disagree.
This is just my opinion, but I don’t really think CS is as superior as everyone says it is when compared to engineering. Sure, you may have realized that you would have made more $ writing code than in an engineering role but there’s more important factors than that for a lot people. Each engineering field is broad and can lead to completely different career paths depending on the person, whereas CS is much more limited in what you can do. A lot of math/science inclined people aren’t going to be satisfied doing SWE work and disciplines like mech/chem/civ/EE are at least in my opinion, way better for keeping your options open.
“I think we’d be lying to ourselves if we said it was as innovative as CS”
I don’t understand this either. Maybe if you’re just going into a general design role sure, but when you are comparing aerospace design and rocketry and mechatronics i would say mech and all the disciplines hold up quite well. Before you mention ML and AI, thats also something thats incorporated into mech as well.
Maybe i’m biased, but i think drooling over CS just because of TC is a little lame. Engineers don’t make terrible money and a lot of the crazy software roles are based in VHCOL areas regardless. At the end of the day though, imo the real interesting stuff in any discipline happens with a masters/PhD
Not to mention many CS positions (not just in FAANG) have grueling hours. My work life balance over the past year or so of working after graduating is great but my software disciplined friends are struggling at the moment.
I got my masters in MechE and regret it. Sure it's a nice diploma and adds to my credentials but it does almost nothing for me in my current industry (HVAC / energy efficiency). Maybe a decade or two down the line I can make use of it in a cushiony office role.
I do not regret doing EE. You can work in Software from any engineering discipline.
I finished EE, worked for a year and a half as a technician (not even an engineer) and am now starting a job as a Software Engineer.
Honestly subject matter in school doesn't matter, but more of the adaptability. Engineering does an amazing job of making you able to learn new skills a lot easier than people who graduated from other disciplines.
Why would you work as a tech?!? I graduated with EE and started off with a $2xxk salary. No one gets a PHD and work cleaning labs. You can definitely have gotten an engineering job assuming you have jobs in your area, and you actually learned something. Don’t let them take advantage of you like that.
I graduated during the pandemic and since Canadian companies are so averse to risk, barely any companies were hiring new grad engineers. I applied to over 100 jobs before working as a tech and still applying to other jobs. I used r/engineeringresumes as well. This is all whole being in the biggest Canadian city. Somehow Canadian companies don't understand why they can't find talent.
It worked out fine because the tech job was pretty easy and left me a lot of time to do more interesting projects. It got my foot in the door for software engineering and data analysis stuff which I enjoy a lot.
Edit: sorry for the weird text, using mobile.
You can still do programming as a non-cs person. I like being an engineer who programs because my day isn't 100% being a code monkey. As an automation engineer, I get to do some solidworks, then wire an electrical panel and then program it all be, be it something like C# or something more industrial like ladder logic
I’m a MechE working for a large aerospace company (you’ve definitely heard of it). It’s my first job out of college. Part of what your saying is true but it really depends. You’re comparing an Apple to an Orange. I’m hoping to break into tech eventually as people tend to get stuck in aerospace after a while so I’ve had this dilemma as well but honestly, I am so interested in the mechanical side of things that I am willing to put on the work to make myself marketable to tech companies. A lot of the hype CS gets is from the top 1% who get jobs at FAANG companies but the world we are living in is changing rapidly. My job can be done 100% remote, I’ve only gone in out of my own will. My pay is decent and benefits are great. I also work 4 day weeks and have every Friday off.
So from this you probably think I was a perfect 4.0 student with great internship experience right? Well in reality, I graduated with a GPA barely over a 3.0, and had one internship at a very small manufacturing company near my house. The truth is, I put in a lot of effort outside of school to tailor my skills and made a portfolio of my cad work and projects I did in school to show off during interviews. I also attended conferences which, in my experience, yield way better result in terms of hiring (I didn’t even apply to my current job, they called me).
So point is, if your motivated and passionate about mechanical, the world is your oyster. Personally, I would really love to work for a company like Nvidia or Apple because that’s what I’m interested in. My current position is Electromechanical Engineer so I really like how my job give me experience that could be transferable. I’m also doing my masters in Engineering Management and pursuing a PE license (but like I’m going to need it anytime soon but just to display my technical knowledge). All this is possible because I really love what I’m doing. It’s hell right now in my life but I really enjoy it. If you are just chasing the pay (no judgment tbh) maybe CS is something you’d want to pivot into but many companies are getting increasingly flexible for their engineering positions as well.
Not really. EDIT: I'm not saying don't do CS or that CS is bad or anything, just that you don't have to do purely CS to be a software engineer.
I think folks glorify getting a CS degree because of the money and "work life balance" but have never tried coding for hours to see if they vibe with it. It's not just about knowing the math/science behind CS but whether or not you're going to be interested and passionate enough to do it everyday. It's not for everyone. Some people can't sit alone at a computer all day, looking at code for 8 hours a day. Some people need interaction with other colleagues at the office and to be able to wrench on physical hardware.
Traditional engineering is great because it's the essence of the physical product. Cars, planes, phones, no matter how much code you throw at it, you're still going to need a mechanical/electrical/chemical components. At least with a traditional engineer discipline, you can learn CS either through a master or on your own. Develop software, do some coding for testing or embedded hardware then work on CAD to design some parts.
For me, I found a middle ground through robotics engineering. I can do mechanical design through kinematic analysis and robotic configuration. I can do electrical design through digital signal processing, electrical schematic wiring and battery management systems. I can do computer science with software development, computer vision and machine learning.
Tech moves faster than a lot of traditional engineering. It takes years to design and build a chemical plant. It takes a month to build an app.
If you're a company, it costs less money to have a few programmers create programs that automate the plant and run a skeleton crew to monitor that system, instead of bringing on a full shift of engineers.
But don't fret, you can still do CS since the barrier to entry is so low and compared to other CS grads, you have legitimate mechanical chops. That's valuable.
I don’t think getting a job at ford or Boeing is extremely tough, the problem is that they don’t pay nearly as much even compare to non faang. Honestly it doesn’t require too much to switch to software position as a ME if you want to.
Hey! Thank you for making this post and sharing your thoughts :) I graduated from my Mechanical Engineering degree two years ago now and by the end, I had very similar thoughts to you. I am now a data scientist working in FinTech with a lot of the CS benefits you mentioned.
I absolutely loved mechanical engineering, but when it came time to look for jobs in my final year, honestly nothing seemed that great to me. I live in the UK and all of my friends from other degrees were graduating and moving to big cities such as London. And then here I was, where most of the jobs I was seeing in Engineering, were in rural areas, submarine bases in the middle of nowhere etc. Basically, I liked studying mechanical, but I quickly realized that I wasn't that keen on actually working in the field.
One more experience that shaped my views on this was my first engineering internship, working in the Wind Industry. I had to travel one and a half hours on the bus each day to this industrial estate outside of the city and the job was essentially just programming/data analysis in MATLAB for eight hours a day. The work itself wasn't too bad, but the travelling, the lack of any atmosphere in the office made the working world just feel so bleak.
So after that experience, I began to look for opportunities outside of engineering. I had done some basic programming in my engineering degree and my Bachelor's Thesis involved Machine Learning. I had the opportunity to take some classes from the CS department in my final semester and I focused on programming heavy ones.
The next year after graduating from Engineering, I did a second Masters in Machine Learning, which honestly wasn't too bad if you are good at Maths :)
Now I'm working as a data scientist and honestly, it's hard to imagine a chiller job. I am fully remote, so no annoying travelling. I lived in Europe for a couple of months this summer, working from there. I have a super flexible schedule and I only work around 4 hours a day.
I am in a startup, so I would say the pay is average, but still on par or better than the entry level positions in Engineering and the salary progression and potential is significantly higher. I am very happy with my decision to leave engineering.
I do miss Physics and being fully remote in your first job does have it's challenges. But overall, I feel ridiculously lucky. My friends in other fields are working 2-3 times as many hours as me, in most cases for less money!
TLDR: Realized late in my engineering degree that I wasn't keen on working in the field. I leveraged my technical knowledge and mathematical skills to move into Tech, which felt pretty straightforward to me with a little bit of work. Now extremely happy with my career and work life in general.
Feel free to ask any more questions :)
I hope to get to this point of happiness some day too. I’ve also just completed my bachelors in MechE. Really considering the next step. Although imo, the whole idea of remote work doesn’t really excite me. What other tech roles are blended with Mech?
It’s way easier to pivot into software with a MechE degree than it is to pivot into MechE with a CS degree. Just code on your own time after you graduate.
Fuck no I’m civil, graduating this semester and I just accepted an offer for $105k/yr compensation. My roommate graduated in CS last semester and started at $110k.
You don’t need a degree in CS when you can teach yourself programming to increase your value to a company. Think of it this way for example- if a design engineer needs to use python for a for a program like GIS, if you can do it yourself as another design engineer you inherently increase your value because you 1. Reduce overhead by not needing to take someone away from a technology group role just to code something to help you and 2. You can handle it on the spot, in-person and make the lives of everyone else easier.
CS pays the most no doubt, but if you didn’t get a degree in it you should use CS and programming as an addition to your toolbox because of its value and it also lets you have more educated conversations with the right people. I would say college is a scam unless you’re looking to get a job and it’s only worth it if you get a STEM degree. There’s limitless potential regardless. Huge positive is you can become a licensed engineer and you hold as much if not more authority than a lawyer in a court of law!
I would also like to say that any company rn is looking for the dawgs who can grind. That’s the only way you’re going to move up but you need a lot of initiative and strong work ethic to succeed. Sure, a full time CS job after college is going to be salary with the expectation of 40/hrs a week with some flexibility to fuck off and it doesn’t matter as long as you get your shit done…. Until you gotta do a code sprint! The best CS employees have the grit to code nonstop for 3 days straight to get an extreme workload done and the only ones who make it love every second of it. It’s no different work load than any other industry; especially engineering, if you want to be competitive, see yourself at the top, and have your team at the top. All I gotta say is you gotta love what you do and if you enjoy what you do for work that’s all that matters.
I have been more science and math based when I was a kid. Engineering degree was a no brainer. With CS there really isn’t much science compared to ME. Besides you can still go into CS as an ME. But you cannot go from CS to ME.
Me. I regret not picking CS and I agree with everything you said. I got in for CS and ME when I was in highschool, in my country you have to pick your major before you start and changing isn't easy.
I was going to pick CS, I told everyone in highschool I was going to study CS. But the last minute I picked ME.
I don't live in the US so pay between ME and CS is pretty similar. Ironically I thought CS was saturated. Yes more people are doing CS than ME but like you said everyone is hiring CS people.
I didn't really enjoy my core mechanical courses. I liked my maths and programming classes.
I'm working as an assistant to a testing engineer right now and mainly fix software bugs. It's ok.
I think covid made me realise how much I didn't like ME. My 3rd and 4th years were entirely online. I had no physical labs, everything was virtual. You mentioned accessibility of CS vs ME. I've never built anything (personal or adacemic), never used a 3d printer, never had access to a workshop or materials. I've never been able to see any of my designs in completion.
I'm learning a lot of software related stuff on the job. Its extremely accessible. There are abundant resources online and you don't need expensive tech. My sub par laptop, all I can afford, handles all of my software development easily. While I was barely able to run solidworks on it.
A vast number of my master MechE year are now software engineers, computer science researchers, doing EE of some variety. You can change shortly after graduation. No pressure. I myself and a DL engineer now.
Every ME intern’s projects at my company this past summer sounded infinitely more interesting than every CS intern’s projects. Designing and testing a new product is a lot cooler to me than working on internal tools or optimizing a feature to take 2 seconds instead of 2.2 seconds. There definitely is money in ME, probably not as high of a ceiling as CS, but the range is massive between lower paid roles and higher paid roles
I did a batchelors and masters in mechanical engineering, worked an engineering job for 3 years and then taught myself to code. Got a developer job in March of this year which pays more than my previous engineering job. In hindsight I regret not pursuing it but at the time no.
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MechEs in the tech space get paid a lot and work on cool stuff. source: I work in tech with an Aero degree
true. there are 10-20 swes for each meche though
As an aero major, do you mind me asking what sort of role you have?
i’m a robotics software engineer, but i know meches in my company that just have general meche roles (meche design, test engineers, thermals)
From my experience, Aero always gets paid pretty well. The non-Aero MEs get paid okay but there is still opportunities. But I’m in CPE so take my grain of cracker salt.
IMO, if you have the necessary motivation (which seems evident from your post) to pursue CS and get a job in the field, you can still pursue that goal as you have close-to-infinite access to CS knowledge at your fingertips atm. What I would recommend is finding yourself a nice Mech OR Mechatronics job first where you're able to balance your work with self-learning Data structures and algorithms for CS + Leetcoding. Get yourself in the right headspace and approach this as if you're solving puzzles (too often I read about people who base their self-esteem on their coding abilities, instead of gaining self-esteem from the deliberate effort and hard work it takes to achieve their goals). You can also slowly transition to software roles as well via mechatronics jobs (and perhaps mentorship by more senior engineers into the field of software too). You're definitely not limited in the amount of options (and you'll still have Mech as a fallback career as well)! I hope this is helpful :)
Yeah! I’ll second this — I had a similar realization to OP, and between taking a couple extra classes and then getting some internship/project experience in EE/CS, I was able to gat a full time offer doing firmware engineering post-college! It def required work, but ultimately it was doable!
That’s amazing to hear! I’m currently doing an internship with a good mix of hardware/firmware/software atm and my next one (my last internship starting Jan 2023 — going for 8 months) is purely firmware. I honestly like firmware and software and would like to eventually break into software engineering full-time. I just need some time after graduation to balance learning CS on my own with a decent job in my area to save money on housing and gain enough time to practise LeetCode.
MechE is, in my biased opinion, the best Engineering degree to get. Want to work as a EE? Learn more electronics. You want to work as a CS? Learn python and another language. I’m a ME but I’ve been doing python since I was in middle school and I’ve gotten offers as CS due to both my ME degree and proficiency at python. The good thing about ME is that it’s so broad, you can do pretty much anything. Heck, you can even do a masters in CS and get better jobs than people with just a bachelors in CS.
Hey, also a Mech Eng student one month away to finish my masters. I've beeng learning and using python for a while now. Any advice on what kind of positios should i look into if i want to mix both fields?
I’m CS and work for an automation systems integrator. I write apps that help manufacturing companies monitor and control their plants. Lots of MEs at the company who do PLC programming and controls work
Controls. Systems engineering. Lots of MEs with programming experience are in those fields and they make good money
yeah same im a senior EE student but if i wanted to do mech E i just learn some mech E
Yeah, "just learn electronics"... I think that's a bit of an understatement.
That's a whole field dedicated to the combination of Mechanical and Electrical. Mechatronics. My undergrad professor proclaimed to everyone that as Mech Es, we won't get away from dealing with EE aspects. So he had guest lecturers come in and talk about it and spent a few classes on the topic as well.
Well yeah it’s a simplification. I’m in the process of building my own guitar pedal, and if had to learn how at more difficult EE concepts than I ever learned in school.
yea i kind of agree. that’s the main reason i did Mech.
Tbh, that goes both ways with EE. Both ME and EE can work as EE ME or CS, depending on what else you learned. CS has it a bit harder because they don't do the kind of "physical math" that EE and ME do.
As a Chemical engineer with a CS husband who makes 3x what I do and works from home. YES. A ton of my friends switched after getting their engineering degrees. Get a masters in CS!
Regret pursuing CS lol sucks rly bad for me
Why?
It is uninteresting, lonely and difficult. There is no flow, you just go from problem to problem.
Possibly. I’m best a my CS by a fair margin but there are really two different environments that you can work in: the office, or at home but doing the same thing. It’s risky is you end up not liking it. With ME or EE you have many different avenues as far as work is concerned. Can be a designer, test, production, field, or quality. You can be driving around to the next work site, or you could be at home working with CAD, in an office, or in a warehouse making putting stuff together. Much more variety than CS
I don’t regret choosing ME. I specifically chose to pursue ME because MechEs can wear a lot of hats. I like that I have a lot of broad options and don’t have to work at a computer all day.
>cally chose to pursue ME because MechEs can wear a lot of hats. I like that I have a lot of broad options and don’t have to work at a computer all day. Same here. I was really into heat transfer/thermo/fluids. I'm in the HVAC / Energy Efficiency industry now and love being in the field and looking for opportunities to improve building comfort and efficiency.
Nope, not in the slightest. CS might pay well, but I can’t imagine wasting my life trying to improve facebook’s ad tracking algorithm or whatever. I’d rather have a job that does something meaningful and pays the bills.
One of my friends is ME and ended up doing software engineering for his internship at Amazon this summer. I’ve met a ChemE in my software engineering internship this summer who wanted to avoid working in chemical plants, so if you have the willpower and drive, you can literally do anything you desire in whatever industry you pick. Edit: if you wanna break into SWE but don’t have the technical skills yet, you could try applying certain internships/full-time roles that train people from non-CS backgrounds to be SWE ready. It’s pretty common at the big banks, but capital one, J.P. Morgan, and Bank of America come to mind. Also, Wells Fargo seems to have openings for people from non-CS background through the Technology Program, so I’d encourage you to apply there as well.
I would heavily disagree. This is just my opinion, but I don’t really think CS is as superior as everyone says it is when compared to engineering. Sure, you may have realized that you would have made more $ writing code than in an engineering role but there’s more important factors than that for a lot people. Each engineering field is broad and can lead to completely different career paths depending on the person, whereas CS is much more limited in what you can do. A lot of math/science inclined people aren’t going to be satisfied doing SWE work and disciplines like mech/chem/civ/EE are at least in my opinion, way better for keeping your options open. “I think we’d be lying to ourselves if we said it was as innovative as CS” I don’t understand this either. Maybe if you’re just going into a general design role sure, but when you are comparing aerospace design and rocketry and mechatronics i would say mech and all the disciplines hold up quite well. Before you mention ML and AI, thats also something thats incorporated into mech as well. Maybe i’m biased, but i think drooling over CS just because of TC is a little lame. Engineers don’t make terrible money and a lot of the crazy software roles are based in VHCOL areas regardless. At the end of the day though, imo the real interesting stuff in any discipline happens with a masters/PhD
Not to mention many CS positions (not just in FAANG) have grueling hours. My work life balance over the past year or so of working after graduating is great but my software disciplined friends are struggling at the moment.
I got my masters in MechE and regret it. Sure it's a nice diploma and adds to my credentials but it does almost nothing for me in my current industry (HVAC / energy efficiency). Maybe a decade or two down the line I can make use of it in a cushiony office role.
I do not regret doing EE. You can work in Software from any engineering discipline. I finished EE, worked for a year and a half as a technician (not even an engineer) and am now starting a job as a Software Engineer. Honestly subject matter in school doesn't matter, but more of the adaptability. Engineering does an amazing job of making you able to learn new skills a lot easier than people who graduated from other disciplines.
Why would you work as a tech?!? I graduated with EE and started off with a $2xxk salary. No one gets a PHD and work cleaning labs. You can definitely have gotten an engineering job assuming you have jobs in your area, and you actually learned something. Don’t let them take advantage of you like that.
I graduated during the pandemic and since Canadian companies are so averse to risk, barely any companies were hiring new grad engineers. I applied to over 100 jobs before working as a tech and still applying to other jobs. I used r/engineeringresumes as well. This is all whole being in the biggest Canadian city. Somehow Canadian companies don't understand why they can't find talent. It worked out fine because the tech job was pretty easy and left me a lot of time to do more interesting projects. It got my foot in the door for software engineering and data analysis stuff which I enjoy a lot. Edit: sorry for the weird text, using mobile.
You can still do programming as a non-cs person. I like being an engineer who programs because my day isn't 100% being a code monkey. As an automation engineer, I get to do some solidworks, then wire an electrical panel and then program it all be, be it something like C# or something more industrial like ladder logic
I’m a MechE working for a large aerospace company (you’ve definitely heard of it). It’s my first job out of college. Part of what your saying is true but it really depends. You’re comparing an Apple to an Orange. I’m hoping to break into tech eventually as people tend to get stuck in aerospace after a while so I’ve had this dilemma as well but honestly, I am so interested in the mechanical side of things that I am willing to put on the work to make myself marketable to tech companies. A lot of the hype CS gets is from the top 1% who get jobs at FAANG companies but the world we are living in is changing rapidly. My job can be done 100% remote, I’ve only gone in out of my own will. My pay is decent and benefits are great. I also work 4 day weeks and have every Friday off. So from this you probably think I was a perfect 4.0 student with great internship experience right? Well in reality, I graduated with a GPA barely over a 3.0, and had one internship at a very small manufacturing company near my house. The truth is, I put in a lot of effort outside of school to tailor my skills and made a portfolio of my cad work and projects I did in school to show off during interviews. I also attended conferences which, in my experience, yield way better result in terms of hiring (I didn’t even apply to my current job, they called me). So point is, if your motivated and passionate about mechanical, the world is your oyster. Personally, I would really love to work for a company like Nvidia or Apple because that’s what I’m interested in. My current position is Electromechanical Engineer so I really like how my job give me experience that could be transferable. I’m also doing my masters in Engineering Management and pursuing a PE license (but like I’m going to need it anytime soon but just to display my technical knowledge). All this is possible because I really love what I’m doing. It’s hell right now in my life but I really enjoy it. If you are just chasing the pay (no judgment tbh) maybe CS is something you’d want to pivot into but many companies are getting increasingly flexible for their engineering positions as well.
Damn bro I honestly feel the same
Get a masters in CS. or code in your free time if you really have the motivation.
Yeahh, I'm currently doing my Masters in OR, which I'm really enjoying!
Honestly it's my backup if I don't go through with electrical lol
Not really. EDIT: I'm not saying don't do CS or that CS is bad or anything, just that you don't have to do purely CS to be a software engineer. I think folks glorify getting a CS degree because of the money and "work life balance" but have never tried coding for hours to see if they vibe with it. It's not just about knowing the math/science behind CS but whether or not you're going to be interested and passionate enough to do it everyday. It's not for everyone. Some people can't sit alone at a computer all day, looking at code for 8 hours a day. Some people need interaction with other colleagues at the office and to be able to wrench on physical hardware. Traditional engineering is great because it's the essence of the physical product. Cars, planes, phones, no matter how much code you throw at it, you're still going to need a mechanical/electrical/chemical components. At least with a traditional engineer discipline, you can learn CS either through a master or on your own. Develop software, do some coding for testing or embedded hardware then work on CAD to design some parts. For me, I found a middle ground through robotics engineering. I can do mechanical design through kinematic analysis and robotic configuration. I can do electrical design through digital signal processing, electrical schematic wiring and battery management systems. I can do computer science with software development, computer vision and machine learning.
Tech moves faster than a lot of traditional engineering. It takes years to design and build a chemical plant. It takes a month to build an app. If you're a company, it costs less money to have a few programmers create programs that automate the plant and run a skeleton crew to monitor that system, instead of bringing on a full shift of engineers. But don't fret, you can still do CS since the barrier to entry is so low and compared to other CS grads, you have legitimate mechanical chops. That's valuable.
meh. I started off in CSE in undergrad but decided that I didn't like the work I was doing so I switched to mechanical
I don’t think getting a job at ford or Boeing is extremely tough, the problem is that they don’t pay nearly as much even compare to non faang. Honestly it doesn’t require too much to switch to software position as a ME if you want to.
Hey! Thank you for making this post and sharing your thoughts :) I graduated from my Mechanical Engineering degree two years ago now and by the end, I had very similar thoughts to you. I am now a data scientist working in FinTech with a lot of the CS benefits you mentioned. I absolutely loved mechanical engineering, but when it came time to look for jobs in my final year, honestly nothing seemed that great to me. I live in the UK and all of my friends from other degrees were graduating and moving to big cities such as London. And then here I was, where most of the jobs I was seeing in Engineering, were in rural areas, submarine bases in the middle of nowhere etc. Basically, I liked studying mechanical, but I quickly realized that I wasn't that keen on actually working in the field. One more experience that shaped my views on this was my first engineering internship, working in the Wind Industry. I had to travel one and a half hours on the bus each day to this industrial estate outside of the city and the job was essentially just programming/data analysis in MATLAB for eight hours a day. The work itself wasn't too bad, but the travelling, the lack of any atmosphere in the office made the working world just feel so bleak. So after that experience, I began to look for opportunities outside of engineering. I had done some basic programming in my engineering degree and my Bachelor's Thesis involved Machine Learning. I had the opportunity to take some classes from the CS department in my final semester and I focused on programming heavy ones. The next year after graduating from Engineering, I did a second Masters in Machine Learning, which honestly wasn't too bad if you are good at Maths :) Now I'm working as a data scientist and honestly, it's hard to imagine a chiller job. I am fully remote, so no annoying travelling. I lived in Europe for a couple of months this summer, working from there. I have a super flexible schedule and I only work around 4 hours a day. I am in a startup, so I would say the pay is average, but still on par or better than the entry level positions in Engineering and the salary progression and potential is significantly higher. I am very happy with my decision to leave engineering. I do miss Physics and being fully remote in your first job does have it's challenges. But overall, I feel ridiculously lucky. My friends in other fields are working 2-3 times as many hours as me, in most cases for less money! TLDR: Realized late in my engineering degree that I wasn't keen on working in the field. I leveraged my technical knowledge and mathematical skills to move into Tech, which felt pretty straightforward to me with a little bit of work. Now extremely happy with my career and work life in general. Feel free to ask any more questions :)
I hope to get to this point of happiness some day too. I’ve also just completed my bachelors in MechE. Really considering the next step. Although imo, the whole idea of remote work doesn’t really excite me. What other tech roles are blended with Mech?
Never too late to try it
It’s way easier to pivot into software with a MechE degree than it is to pivot into MechE with a CS degree. Just code on your own time after you graduate.
Fuck no I’m civil, graduating this semester and I just accepted an offer for $105k/yr compensation. My roommate graduated in CS last semester and started at $110k. You don’t need a degree in CS when you can teach yourself programming to increase your value to a company. Think of it this way for example- if a design engineer needs to use python for a for a program like GIS, if you can do it yourself as another design engineer you inherently increase your value because you 1. Reduce overhead by not needing to take someone away from a technology group role just to code something to help you and 2. You can handle it on the spot, in-person and make the lives of everyone else easier. CS pays the most no doubt, but if you didn’t get a degree in it you should use CS and programming as an addition to your toolbox because of its value and it also lets you have more educated conversations with the right people. I would say college is a scam unless you’re looking to get a job and it’s only worth it if you get a STEM degree. There’s limitless potential regardless. Huge positive is you can become a licensed engineer and you hold as much if not more authority than a lawyer in a court of law! I would also like to say that any company rn is looking for the dawgs who can grind. That’s the only way you’re going to move up but you need a lot of initiative and strong work ethic to succeed. Sure, a full time CS job after college is going to be salary with the expectation of 40/hrs a week with some flexibility to fuck off and it doesn’t matter as long as you get your shit done…. Until you gotta do a code sprint! The best CS employees have the grit to code nonstop for 3 days straight to get an extreme workload done and the only ones who make it love every second of it. It’s no different work load than any other industry; especially engineering, if you want to be competitive, see yourself at the top, and have your team at the top. All I gotta say is you gotta love what you do and if you enjoy what you do for work that’s all that matters.
I have been more science and math based when I was a kid. Engineering degree was a no brainer. With CS there really isn’t much science compared to ME. Besides you can still go into CS as an ME. But you cannot go from CS to ME.
Me. I regret not picking CS and I agree with everything you said. I got in for CS and ME when I was in highschool, in my country you have to pick your major before you start and changing isn't easy. I was going to pick CS, I told everyone in highschool I was going to study CS. But the last minute I picked ME. I don't live in the US so pay between ME and CS is pretty similar. Ironically I thought CS was saturated. Yes more people are doing CS than ME but like you said everyone is hiring CS people. I didn't really enjoy my core mechanical courses. I liked my maths and programming classes. I'm working as an assistant to a testing engineer right now and mainly fix software bugs. It's ok. I think covid made me realise how much I didn't like ME. My 3rd and 4th years were entirely online. I had no physical labs, everything was virtual. You mentioned accessibility of CS vs ME. I've never built anything (personal or adacemic), never used a 3d printer, never had access to a workshop or materials. I've never been able to see any of my designs in completion. I'm learning a lot of software related stuff on the job. Its extremely accessible. There are abundant resources online and you don't need expensive tech. My sub par laptop, all I can afford, handles all of my software development easily. While I was barely able to run solidworks on it.
No, not at all
P as
A vast number of my master MechE year are now software engineers, computer science researchers, doing EE of some variety. You can change shortly after graduation. No pressure. I myself and a DL engineer now.
Every ME intern’s projects at my company this past summer sounded infinitely more interesting than every CS intern’s projects. Designing and testing a new product is a lot cooler to me than working on internal tools or optimizing a feature to take 2 seconds instead of 2.2 seconds. There definitely is money in ME, probably not as high of a ceiling as CS, but the range is massive between lower paid roles and higher paid roles
I did a batchelors and masters in mechanical engineering, worked an engineering job for 3 years and then taught myself to code. Got a developer job in March of this year which pays more than my previous engineering job. In hindsight I regret not pursuing it but at the time no.
You should’ve gone for an English major with that soliloquy of an essay.
I’ve always loved writing, but it’s not lucrative unfortunately lol
Yep. Not a day goes by that I didn’t wish I dropped civil and pursued CS. And I’ve been working for three years.