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First job as software engineer. Realized I don't love it as much as I love the humanities/social sciences. What to do? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 days ago by jurassicneil@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

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So I just finished my masters in CS and got a job as a junior software engineer. When I first chose CS for my bachelors, I did so because it was somewhat intuitive for me. But I wasn't crazy about it. Thought the interest would grow over time. I've had undiagnosed ADHD throughout my life and thought the difficulties with CS during my bachelor's (which took almost 7 years) was due to the ADHD and not due to lack of interest in the subject. Learned coping strategies and did my master's. Graduated with a 4.0 GPA so I'm not bad at it for sure.

Now I'm medicated and I finally feel like I'm able to be 100% of myself. But despite that, I still just do the tasks at work for the sake of doing it. I like the problem solving aspect but it isn't something I dream about every day. I see my mentor working in the same company live and breathe this stuff and I can tell there is a clear difference in the thought process between both of us. It's easy for him to produce great quality work as he's naturally curious about this stuff. Me, I just try to get it done. It's not lead by curiosity for me. What grabs my interest is stuff like literature, history, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, movies etc. I don't need any incentive for those things. I'm naturally curious about those fields.

Now I'm wondering if I should still stick with software engineering where I'm decently okay but not that curious about it . Or should I consider a career more aligned with the social sciences/humanities? I don't even know what careers are in those fields that would be comparable in terms of pay/growth to software engineering. Is the choice between money and passion or can I have both to some degree in the non-SWE fields?

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[–] blame@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

jr positions dont come with much atonomy, youre basically there to learn and close tickets. As you do more learning and get a better understanding of the systems youre working on you will be able to intuitively come up with better solutions. You should also be learning about operationalizing the systems youre working on, how to respond to incidents, how to know an incident is even happening. You should be learning how to operate in a software organization. Make friends with managers on other teams, you never know when youll need to collaborate.

[–] jurassicneil@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

I'm actually given a lot of autonomy at my job. It's the learning aspect that I'm sort of struggling with. I do learn but it's like I'm forcing myself to do so instead of finding something in it that piques my curiosity and leading with that. As such I don't feel like I'm gonna learn as well as I should if I was naturally a bit curios about it.