How do you move from chemical engineering to software development?
Write your own chemical engineering software and sell it. YES, YES, YES! IAAP (and shit, I’ll even be YP if the project’s right). I cannot agree more with the comments above that working, as an employee, in software development can easily become the least rewarding and most irritating way to spend 8 (or 10, or 12) hours a day. As people have said above, writing for your own projects tends to be very easy. You can make all the design decisions; you can choose patterns, abstractions, and tools that make you comfortable and improve your workflow; you can take as much time as you need; no managers constantly coming by your cube to make stupid comments about the alignment of the toolbar while you’re deep in the zone trying to figure out why that pointer is NULL. Take your huge investment in chemical engineering domain knowledge, and turn that into profit for you, not some other damn boss. You can make bank on a good bit of never-before-seen CE software… or, you can sit in the next cube ov
IANAP but many years ago I worked with software developed in an academic environment and found there was a big difference between something that basically worked when you knew what you were doing and something that was robust enough to stand up to ignorant users and/or be maintained over time. Just wondering it would be helpful to volunteer to help a nonprofit that needed your computer skills – you might learn a lot from having a real client and real users.
IANAP but I do have a chem engineering degree and work in software development, but from the business analyst side. I work in the hazard communication/chemical regulatory field (MSDSs, etc) and a chemical background is immensely helpful. I agree with the above posters who tell you to check out software development in the chemical industry, because there are a number of good companies out there. There are especially some upcoming chemical regulations which, in my opinion, mean there will be plenty of work in this area for the next few years. my email’s in my profile, if you want more specific information.
You should remember it is quite remarkable that self-made programmers exist at all. A self-made chemical engineer would be laughed out of the resume stack. I believe you have severely under-estimated the difficulty developing professional-level programming skills. A three-year undergraduate degree is the fast path to becoming a professional programmer. Through any other path, you should expect to take longer. I have one friend who took the long road. He started with personal project, followed by small programming contracts. It took a while before he could land an awful, unstable, underpaid, sub-entry-level programmer position. There, he did a kind of repetitive mindnumbing programming that college graduates refused to do. It is only after a series of such positions that he became a credible professional programmer with a decent job. The whole path took five or six years. Why would you expect it to be faster than college? Programming is hard, there is a lot to learn. I am guessing that
Related Questions
- what is biomolecular engineering; how is it connected to chemical engineering; and how does it differ from biomedical engineering?
- What are the qualifications for admission to the graduate programs in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering?
- How do you move from chemical engineering to software development?
