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Comment by calcsam | Hacker News Reader

Having an outside area of expertise -- in your case, electrical engineering -- is great for your development career.

You can target companies in the overlap & pitch them that your experience makes you a unique candidate.

Examples that come to mind -- Autodesk (builds CAD software), wearables, drones, Internet of Things (eg Nest), sensors....

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This coincides with what my friend told me as well -- he said most CS graduates don't really get low level hardware processes, and my knowledge in that can be quite desirable, especially since Electrical Engineering is a related field to Software Engineering, but I guess I've been under-rating my qualifications.

Most people do :)

Take a look at Scott Adams' post on dual areas of expertise. It's one of the best primers on how to think about a career:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

Thanks for the read, just finished. The most interesting thing about this post for me is that what he's saying seems like it should just be common sense -- of course that's the way things are, it makes a lot of sense and is a very logical way of thinking about it.

That's kind of what bothers me about it. It IS obvious and logical... so why hadn't I considered it as clearly before? Why is everyone so narrow in our focuses after graduating college? I don't know, and quite honestly it bothers me. It's a good read, but I can't shake this slight feeling of anger and frustration; I almost want to blame the school environment and society, but I feel that's naive` and not where to place the blame?

Feeling pretty mixed right now, haha.

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