Comment by BeetleB
2 days ago
“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.”
Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.
I've lived both worlds.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...
I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
Not the ones I dealt with.
Mechanical Engineer: I build real things that I can touch!
Electrical Engineer: I get to play with oscilloscopes, and do soldering!
You get the idea.
I think this is because as students, a lot of engineering work is either labs, or on paper. They don't realize how much dependent on computers professional engineering work is.