>>11997324I'm in the exact same situation. Two years out. I hate it. I could tell I was going to hate design since junior or senior year of college, so I went technical sales. If I stay here for a decade I can get a good salary, but it requires a ton of hours per week, it's always a hustle, you never really become an expert in anything, always just cramming more sales related facts in your head. I don't do any math beyond arithmetic. All the real engineering work is siloed out to the engineering team, who probably have even more tedious jobs than me.
From my perch here I can see that everything mechanical engineering related - short of being some 20 year old whiz-kid doing R&D for some billion dollar company (and even then that same kid would make twice as much doing something computer related) - is underpaid tedium and stagnation.
I saw the writing on the wall by the time Junior year came around, but by then, switching to Computer Science or Computer Engineering or something would have probably added three extra semesters. And I was going to an extremely expensive school (which my rich grandpa paid for) so I was really hesitant to extend my undergrad. Plus I didn't want to be some unemployable loser who took 5.5 years to get a bachelors in CS. So I took my 4-year, Ivy League MechE degree with honors and here I am making $65,000 a year.
I don't know the solution. Maybe grad school for CS? But I never took object oriented programming or anything beyond intro CS classes and the stuff integrated into our MechE courses. So it'd be at least two years grad school. And I don't even know if I'd like CS so it's a big leap of faith to jump into that.
Ideally I'd use my (supposed) math skills from engineering to sneak into some sort of big-brained job outside of engineering that actually requires non-tedious, non-braindead-rote-pattern-repetition type thinking. But that's such a vague notion it's not even helpful and I'm just average at math for a MechE BS.
