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Finish you degree with a minor in Business and go into the management aspect of IT sounds like the best plan. After you got some experience you should be able to “shop around” a bit for some other type of management position that aligns with your interest.
Production Test Engineer: You write code that runs on every device before it's marked as good. You're trying to optimise for test time (every extra second costs money) and minimise false negatives/positives. There are many opportunities for statistics/physics here, especially in the mixed-signal space.
(Field) Application Engineer: You help customers use the products produced by your company. You help make reference designs for PCBs, write demos that show off the product etc. The field version travels to customer sites and helps debug problems.
Verification Engineer: You'll be writing lots of code to test stuff written by the digital designers. This profession is in a really weird place, most people that get hired are EE's, but verification has basically become software development at this point. Lots of high level software abstractions exist now and lots of people that work in this area are struggling with them (at least from what I've seen).
Quality engineer: honestly, not too sure what they do. Lots of statistics, maths and complaining about shit :).
Probably more titles I can't think of right now.
Anyway, just some ideas to try which might be things you haven't heard of before. I have no idea where you are based, but many semiconductor companies offer internships where you can get a taste for some of these areas. It's difficult to know if you'd enjoy any of them though. I didn't quite get what specifically you hate about CS :).
Finish you degree with a minor in Business and go into the management aspect of IT sounds like the best plan. After you got some experience you should be able to “shop around” a bit for some other type of management position that aligns with your interest.
There's a program in my university called "Management Information Systems." I suppose I should look at what kind of things their majors do, and what their jobs are usually like?
MIS more prepares you for building IT in regular business. It's broad but shallow; you learn about database design, project management, application development, networking, the whole gamut (depending on your school). You learn the real stuff on "the street" anyway. Companies typically treat it as equivalent to a CS degree. You can get into whatever industry that interests you.
*I switched from CS to MIS and glad I did, but this info is 20+ years old, things might have changed since.
(Edit) If you like C etc. more than app programming, do the malware analysis route you mentioned. For heaven's sake don't become another Android or web dev, you'll be in hell.
If you want some more random stuff to try, look into working in the semiconductor industry. There are a bunch of jobs with varying degrees of programming. It would be difficult to get a digital/analogue design job as a CS major, but there are a bunch of things you could do. Production Test Engineer: You write code that runs on every device before it's marked as good. You're trying to optimise for test time (every ext…
Why is it too late to switch to e.g. physics or EE? You may tack on an extra year of school, and the financial cost thereof; and I'm sure the make-up classes and homework will be hard; but your education will set the trajectory of your adult life so it's probably worth it. You wouldn't be the first or the last to bail on a degree in their third year. Knowing some basic programming will make you better at those fields…
Interesting, what's wrong with Android or web dev? I keep hearing they're pretty okay to get into.
How about automation? I used to work in an automation company (as a dev), and the work the engineers did seemed to fit your profile pretty well: Electrical engineering, project management, customer support and some dev to put it all together. I'm guessing the roles will be more distinct in larger companies (we were about 60 people total), but ICS is a nice middle ground between EE and programming.
How about automation? I used to work in an automation company (as a dev), and the work the engineers did seemed to fit your profile pretty well: Electrical engineering, project management, customer support and some dev to put it all together. I'm guessing the roles will be more distinct in larger companies (we were about 60 people total), but ICS is a nice middle ground between EE and programming.
Heh, I've never heard of automation companies. I'll look this up, thank you!