I’d like to start my path in the tech field because I’ve seen it’s a lot more rewarding financially and also the teams seem to be friendlier than the non tech ones where they basically eat you alive in corporate.
I’m leaned more towards AI advancements but I’m not so sure which career will help me more in that case. I’m open to suggestions
In: Engineering
I am a computer scientist. I write a program for me to use in research (this can be lots of things). If other people use it, thats a great plus, but they generally dont. And its a good thing they dont. I have ~5 projects I have worked on and used for research. Only 1 of them is stable enough I would be comfortable handing it to the average computer programmer and saying “Here, use this, it solves your problem.” Only 2 of the projects have a GUI (and neither of those are stable).
Basically, the final product isnt the code, its the research you can do the code with. Any hacked together code you can come up with that does the research is just fine.
A software engineer on the other hand writes programs intended for thousands of laypeople to use. It has to look nice, be user friendly, not crash or corrupt data (at least not very often). It has to be scalable to more users, and it has to be maintainable. There has to be a way to track bugs and allocate jobs to a large team.
Basically, the final product is the product and the support for the product. If the code isnt maintainable and stable, and usable by an average person, its not valuable for SE.
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