Engineering carrer guidance required

[narutoish]

hi i am high school senior and looking forward to becoming an engineer. my first choice is software engineering because i like working with computers and i am good with math. if any of you guys can provide any information/advice realated to the career it would be appreciated. i have heard that software engineers are only good for a couple of years, and after that their skills are outdated, so please let me know if that's true. also let me know how i should progress from here on.

my second option was petroleum engineering, so any advice/information related to that would also be helpful. though i want to know what you have to study to become petroluem engineer.

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

You heard nonsense from someone who knows nothing of which he or she speaks.

Here's the deal: Engineers of all kinds continue learning in the field. It is even a requirement in most states in order to maintain a professional engineering certificate (soon to become available for software engineers).

It is true, you can do this to yourself if you fail to keep pace with industry. If you're not careful, you too can wake up one morning and discover that everyone else is writing software for a totally new or wild language, application, or platform.

If I were you, I'd keep pace with the things happening in the embedded software design world. This is about to go through a significant revolution when people start embedding security and authentication features into high reliability and high availability products.

But that said, nobody is an expert at predicting where the next big thing will be with computing platforms. Although I have opinions on it, it is highly likely that I'm completely wrong.

At the end of the day, these are your decisions and your mistakes to make. Do me a favor and make your mistakes on something new that nobody has seen before. I hate seeing people do the same dumb mistakes over and over again...

 

[Klungo]

"Here's the deal: Engineers of all kinds continue learning in the field."

Precisely the case.

@OP: Seeing as you're interested in computers, you should look into programs pertaining to computer science, software engineering and hardware engineering.

Some schools often combine the last two into a single computer engineering degree where you specialize in software, hardware, robotics, etc in the end.

If you have an idea of where you're going for college, I would suggest you check their curriculum and degree programs.

 

[mayonaise]

hi i am high school senior and looking forward to becoming an engineer. my first choice is software engineering because i like working with computers and i am good with math. if any of you guys can provide any information/advice realated to the career it would be appreciated. i have heard that software engineers are only good for a couple of years, and after that their skills are outdated, so please let me know if that's true. also let me know how i should progress from here on.

my second option was petroleum engineering, so any advice/information related to that would also be helpful. though i want to know what you have to study to become petroluem engineer.

In software engineering, there are things that are outdated really quickly, like the newest hottest language/framework/platform and whatnot. Then, there are things that remain useful for very long time, such as algorithms/math. Fortunately, in the universities they teach you things that remain useful, so it's a good idea to get a degree in computer science. Eventually you develop a taste for what you should master and what is use and forget.

The spirit is, if you have learned the foundations really well, then you're supposed to pick up the newest and hottest without much problem, at least no more problem than other people.

I also find these hints very interesting: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html