Transition from engineering to programming

Not as easy as you’d think

I know someone who has. Industrial Engineer who developed an enterprise system for a large organization of over 40000 people that he manages with three people underneath him.

Don't do programming. It sucks.

I’m a sh*tcoin engineer. I make complex looking models of graphs to predict the trading prices of sh*tcoins that might someday be used as currency

Lots of people have done this. Having a strong quantitative background with Math, Physical Sciences, or Engineering is an excellent background to programming. The question is, is this the right career move (for you)? Once you get away from the engineering side of things, then the opposite move (back) from programming into engineering is harder. You might be an "OK" programmer with an engineering background, but you could be a domain expert in your engineering field.

You could easily do this 10 years ago. Times have changed. It's a much more competitive, tracked career field. Knowing how to program is no longer considered some rare, mystical skill, like it once was. Once it started paying as much as doctors, everyone started studying C.S., dreaming of "FAANG offer" blah blah, saturating the field. The largest major at almost any college (even Princeton, for example), by far, is now C.S. So everyone has to do more and more work to be competitive for the limited number of entry-level jobs.

I have known multiple people who have done this, some went to C/C++, some went to Python. While they seem to be happy about their career, in general, I would encourage anyone thinking of going into CS/programming to think about it long and hard before attempting the switch. It is something that only a very specific kind of person can do and enjoy. Burnout is common even among people who are making tons of money and seemingly have decent work-life balance. I spend a lot of time programming and working with databases, excel, etc, but I genuinely love this stuff and find it to be "fun" a lot of the time. Almost all other people outside of CS/programming I have ever tried to show stuff too instantly gets a blank "deer in headlights, I'm not interested" look on their face, even when I'm showing them very basic things that are highly relevant to what they do. Most people just do not enjoy this stuff at all.

Probably not a problem if you're an engineer, but I also read a paper that said CS/programming is more dependent on having a high IQ than about any other field. I am not saying CS people are smarter than everyone else, but apparently it is a field that you simply cannot survive in without having a decently high IQ (higher than what it takes to be a doctor, scientist, lawyer, etc). I have known very intelligent people who say one of the things they dislike about the field is how cognitively draining it is, that their workday is spent using their brainpower all day long, and they're mentally fried by the time they get home. It takes a certain kind of person to work in this field and enjoy it.