I graduated in '01 with an EE degree. At that point in time, engineering, including software, seemed like a field where you were ushered down a career path towards a pigeon-holed role at a large company. The advice was to get into a) technical sales, b) product marketing, or c) consulting if you wanted to start a career towards being an entrepreneur.
Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer.
What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now.
Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time.
So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.
Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer.
What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now.
Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time.
So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.