Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?

I feel the same way - although we probably both would have ended up being programmers anyway.

I'll be the guy who ruins it by asking a clarifying question. If I can do it all over, does that mean, that I keep the wide mental aperture I have forced open over the past 20 years, by learning how people work, learning how general process works, folding probable outcomes and recognizing corner cases, into my personal toolkit? And forget the software engineering? I'd have to go with a hell no. I'd be someone else.

If I lost everything except the notion that I kinda love this stuff? Yeah, I'm sure I would.

Do I go back to 1998 or do I start over now? It's becoming more obvious to me that the closer you can warp back to about 1950 for these start-over fantasies, the better a time you're going to have. I would be in a full panic if I had to start over right now, a fresh 22 year old undergrad with a 2018 degree in software. Yikes. Maybe that's just a me-getting-old thing peeking through. I sure hope it is. And am worried it's not, for younger folks on here.

I would still do it but I would also do something else.

I didn't realize this until after college, but outside of a CS 101 class you can't be just a programmer. Programming doesn't happen in a vacuum - it must be applied to a domain.

For some people, a lot of whom are on this website, the domain can be computer science. Writing a compiler, database, or operating system would fall into that category. Things on the cutting edge like VR or AR would also fall into this category. This particular kind of programming has never appealed to me personally. I don't much care for programming itself or even computer science itself.

However, there are a lot of interesting problems to be solved in other domains that require programming. Economic models, biotechnology, digital synthesizers, etc.

Unfortunately, without the domain knowledge required in those fields, it's pretty hard to find a job solving those problems. All that's left is CRUD work where the domain is opaque business logic that requires little to no expertise but is dreadfully boring.

So I would go back and treat programming as a tool to be applied to problems that I care about instead of the main focus of my education.

I was an undergraduate journalism major. If learning about people and the world is your want, then you’d be hard pressed to beat journalism.

That said, I fell back on my computing hobby even before I graduated. When I started college, print journalism still seemed like a plausible career. By the time I graduated, I saw the writing on the wall.

As long as we’re talking what-ifs, I’d take the well paid journalist job in a heartbeat.

yeah, but i would have aimed for the FANG level companies from the get go rather than settle for various startup companies