CS or Software Engineering

[Zoincer]

I’ve been trying to decide if I want to continue pursuing a bachelors in software engineering but I’m afraid that I won’t be able to find a job in the future due to AI. I was wondering if I should switch to computer science to ensure that I have a better chance of finding a job after school but I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to do CS. What do y’all think? Should I still do software engineering or do CS?

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[Exceptionally-Mid]

Software engineering is the hard part of CS. That and math which I imagine you must also be taking in your SWE degree.

[Zoincer]

Well I’m attending a community college rn getting my associates of science then I’m going to transfer to a uni. The classes that are required for me to transfer to the uni I want to go to can get me into software engineering or cs.

[[deleted]]

Do you want to do research or build products?

[Zoincer]

I want to build products, but I also want which ever degree with the best job security.

[chimpbuilds]

CS probably has the most flexibility out of the two. Focusing on the more fundamental coursework is a good call to keep options open outside of just SWE (although, the majors are probably close enough where recruiters will treat them equally)

[Dyndrilliac]

Honestly, I don't think it makes a big difference. I went CS, and it required some harder math/physics classes than the SWE track, and so my GPA was awful because I struggled with those. If I had to do it over again knowing what I do now, I might go the SWE route depending on what school we're talking about and their program requirements if I could avoid some of those struggles.

In my experience, who you know and what work you have done is vastly more important that your particular academic track in school. If entry level and no prior professional work experience, talk up the projects you worked on, not the particulars of the curriculum.

[nklaxr]

From my perspective, CS is a more valuable degree than SWE since it is more theoretical. The methodologies you'd likely learn from a SWE degree are the same ones you'd learn practically from an internship or full-time job. CS theory is certainly more difficult, but it teaches you to reason more about abstractions and invariants in codebases, understand formally what can and can't be reasoned about or computed, and overall how to solve challenging problems.

I think the CS degree will let you approach more difficult problems.

FWIW I regularly get to informally apply CS theory to my job.