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Comment by stonemetal | Hacker News Reader

You say he has a technical masters, Why doesn't he pursue software development in that field? If he is an EE doing embedded hardware transitioning to embedded software could be an easier career move than generic junior web dev. There are computational specialties for every science i.e. computational biology, computational chemistry, etc. so he shouldn't have a problem no matter which field his background is in.

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I completely agree, but from personal experience, it's _very_ hard to get a job that allows you to actually write code when you wind up in the sort of role you're describing.

At least for me, there has always been a strict firewall between "developers" and "domain experts". The roles are dictated by the degree you have.

Basically, as a "domain expert" you wind up doing tech support (i.e. help desk / call center / on-site training, etc) for whatever gets developed instead of actually gaining any software development experience.

Admittedly, my experience is entirely restricted to large corporate settings, so the situation is probably very different at smaller companies.

I beg to differ on this point. Embedded software development in general needs more of core CS/CE curriculum than any normal application development does (web, desktop, mobile). You might get away with learning to program for say android, or say Dekstop apps in .net without knowing OS, Automata, Compilers, C/Assembly language, TCP/IP. But you can't do without those in embedded. Besides, learning languages such as C or C++ would require more time and effort. So unless this guy has gone through much of those in EE already, this is a bad idea in my opinion. I would also argue that even if he had, still going through all those courses in theory is different from going through them with a programming mindset.

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