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First job as software engineer. Realized I don't love it as much as I love the humanities/social sciences. What to do? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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So I just finished my masters in CS and got a job as a junior software engineer. When I first chose CS for my bachelors, I did so because it was somewhat intuitive for me. But I wasn't crazy about it. Thought the interest would grow over time. I've had undiagnosed ADHD throughout my life and thought the difficulties with CS during my bachelor's (which took almost 7 years) was due to the ADHD and not due to lack of interest in the subject. Learned coping strategies and did my master's. Graduated with a 4.0 GPA so I'm not bad at it for sure.

Now I'm medicated and I finally feel like I'm able to be 100% of myself. But despite that, I still just do the tasks at work for the sake of doing it. I like the problem solving aspect but it isn't something I dream about every day. I see my mentor working in the same company live and breathe this stuff and I can tell there is a clear difference in the thought process between both of us. It's easy for him to produce great quality work as he's naturally curious about this stuff. Me, I just try to get it done. It's not lead by curiosity for me. What grabs my interest is stuff like literature, history, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, movies etc. I don't need any incentive for those things. I'm naturally curious about those fields.

Now I'm wondering if I should still stick with software engineering where I'm decently okay but not that curious about it . Or should I consider a career more aligned with the social sciences/humanities? I don't even know what careers are in those fields that would be comparable in terms of pay/growth to software engineering. Is the choice between money and passion or can I have both to some degree in the non-SWE fields?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Agree with the sentiment expressed by everyone here. You could always take humanities courses at your local community college just to scratch that itch of learning something that you aren't paid to do, or explore non-professional clubs and hobbyist groups about linguistics and sociology and such. It's what I intend to do once I get my computer science and linguistics degree in 4-5 years.

Here are some linguistic websites I browse + some that were recommended to me throughout my linguistic classes.

Maybe you can try computational linguistics? That is mostly AI development though, and I'm not sure what the market for that looks like right now. :V

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

You could always take humanities courses at your local community college just to scratch that itch of learning something that you aren't paid to do, or explore non-professional clubs and hobbyist groups about linguistics and sociology and such.

I wish my town had stuff like that available to me. I don't think you can take random courses at the university unless you're going for an actual degree, and the community college only has shit like accounting and other very businessy stuff that people do not learn for personal enjoyment.