Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out?

For what it's worth, I think that you might be wrestling with issues greater than a choice (or perceived lack of choice) of college major. I would suggest talking to a therapist regarding the boredom and frustration. It sounds like you might be depressed and mourning the loss of what you believed life could have been.

I have a MS in CS, and I work for a zoological nonprofit. It involves a fair amount of coding, but I'm also not chained to a desk. The projects are interesting and also provide a benefit to my community. I get to work on database designs, animal-computer interaction enrichment, microcontroller lighting, ecommerce, sound design, and veterinary equipment. The pay is a far cry from FAANG level, but the benefits are excellent and I've made a great career path for myself.

I was tired of working in a traditional coding role, and I started thinking about how I could use the skills I do have in a more fulfilling way for my community and the things in life I love. In the role I have now, even the boring stuff isn't very boring, because the bottom line is something that I care deeply about.

I'll bet that if you tracked the career path of CS and Engineering graduates, you'd see the following pattern. Let's assume (this is a bad assumption) the majority go into a technical role (e.g. Software Engineer, Electrical Engineer). After 2-3 years following graduation, you'd see a large percentage of people move from technical roles into semi-hands on roles (e.g. PreSales, Team Lead, Technical Marketing, etc) and then at 5 years, another jump into non-technical roles (Product Manager, People Manager, Sales, Marketing). At 10 years after graduation, I'd be surprised if even 20% of people with STEM degrees are still in a hand-on technical role.

Regarding Physics, I can't even remember how many people I know with advanced degrees in the sciences who are now in management roles in the private sector, or other roles that don't use even 5% of what they learned in their degree. I work for a company in the healthcare sector, I'm still astonished by the number of times I've heard "I have PhD in Physics/Chemistry/Biochemistry and 5+ years of post-doc research, and now I'm have meetings all day my "tools" are Excel/PowerPoint."

>do you know anyone who ended up with a non-coding job with a CS degree?

I know a lot of people who have done this. As you may have surmised from my comments, it's extremely common and people many people do much better from a career and salary perspective since they go into a job area where they can thrive, rather than stay in a coding role they don't like.

I was a CS major... then I had like 5 other majors before I dropped out of college altogether. I never had traditional "software engineering" job. There are a million things you can do. These last few years I've been going deep into some esoteric cybersecurity research. Coding is helpful to get the job done, but it's not assembly line style programming.

No, yes, maybe. So like imagine your a product manager, but your product isnt a CRUD app, its a REST api users hit to get data. They either pay access for it, or more commonly you expose it for people in your enterprise. (So say you work for Walmart or Amazon and your team exposes an api for another team in the enterprise to make updates to a delivery time)

Most product managers are not technical but can understand CRUD apps just fine (the app should do this when the user clicks this!). They struggle when the product is an endpoint you can hit with curl that has an interconnected chain of dependencies and other teams that also expose APIs that are owned by other product managers.