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Not trying to be confrontational either in answering your question. Just sharing an anecdote, since I have some experience working in a company that for a time, employed mostly EE as software engineers. I'll call this company Y (since the X alias is now prone to create confusion).

Y is entrenched in the business of producing monitoring tools for electrical systems (power systems, controllers, rt simulation, etc). Beyond very basic drivers and software to interface with their devices, the actual useful apps to work with them were always written by partner companies that were in the software business.

One day, Y found itself having to compete with a former partner (a software company) that had acquired one of Y's direct competitors (power systems, controllers, simulation, etc). Y then thought it was time they became less reliant on external software for their products and it made sense that they, too, entered the software business. The obvious next step was to reverse engineer and replicate some of the existing apps that were interfacing with their systems.

Y first tried to hire some SE for the job. But faced with the challenge of paying SE salaries, it was reasoned that since Y's existing EE have the academic prerequisite to code, they can probably do the job. A few meetings later, company management and the various EE managers all agreed that code is obviously code. Network, web, desktop, you name it, they can build. They can do it all.

Three years of technical debt later, they tried hiring actual SE who, upon interacting with the code, just kept leaving, for some reason. By the fourth year, those projects were scrapped and new ones started from scratch, with actual SE as project leaders and a few handpicked former-EE-turned-software-devs from the old teams.

All this to say that although EE can technically write code, building software, if done right, is a lot more than about simply spewing logic with a programming language. I'm not saying that an EE can't also become a qualified software dev, but once that happens, they'll want to be paid a software dev salary.



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