What’s more lucrative: software development or data engineering?

[Ellax]

two skills boot camp courses 12weeks being offered by the government. Out of curiosity, which one is more lucrative and more likely to ensure employment at the end?

Sorry I know this is incredibly vague - A asking for a free who needs help.

any responses deeply appreciated!

thanks!

Software engineering I’d say bit of course it depends on how good you are at it.

my friend has done very well out of it but he really loves it. Would not be my thing at all. Just because you pay for a 12 week course doesn’t mean you’re going to be set up for life. Obviously you need an interest and competence.

Both can pay very very well if you are good at them. Real data engineering is an up and coming specialism that is going to be more and more in demand as large companies look to turn their existing data silos into a proper data lake and without top notch data engineers that just can’t happen

Software engineering is obviously far broader as DE is just a branch of it - a good DE can write code just as well as an SE

Your friend needs to look at jobs available locally to them and go from there.
What is your friends background? DH is an engineer and has a computer science degree. Some of his colleagues have the same but others have maths, engineering or science degrees.

DH works for a big US tech firm and the salaries for software engineers are £££.

However these 12 week boot camp style courses are known to not be great in the industry. Fine to get a bit of an intro and learn absolute basics, but not useful for employment without significant additional independent work.

I would also flag that entry level engineering roles that pay well are becoming really difficult to find as AI really can do a lot of the software engineering previously carried out by new entrants into the sector. I leant to code for fun for a couple of years and AI can easily surpass my skills. As such you have to develop your skills a lot independently before you become employable.

I world also recommend against uni courses for software engineering. Realistically they are always going to be out of date compared to the actual tech being used on the ground (sometimes laughably so!).

Sorry to be so doom and gloom. This is just one person's perspective. If you're really driven you can definitely make a good career.

If you find a good niche you can make good money, especially if you work for a US company. Similarly there seem good opportunities in areas such as security or fintech.

Also just because wages aren't what they were, does not mean they are poor compared with professions such as healthcare etc.

Alternatively I have a friend who went cask to uni to do data science and they are really struggling to get a job. So who knows!

In short, pick the one that is most interesting as you will need to do a lot to get into a good career pathway. But once you are in these careers I'd say progression is really good.

I also work for a US software company and echo what otehr have said. Either would be a great intro and maybe lead onto a degree or a part time degree, but no company I know would take on someone for either role without a university degree.

The exception would be maybe an internship or back to work type scheme maybe.

Unless your friend knows that they enjoy and have attitude or experience of at least a bit of coding, id do the data engineering one (more interesting, up and coming).

Could be a great course to get them onto a degree or part-time degree if that's what theyre after. Im not sure it would lead to much on its own, unless linked to some sort of government employment scheme as well.

Is this the same thing as coding? I know a few colleagues partner's have done coding courses like this and have very lucrative careers now.
My boyfriend did one of these coding bootcamps, and it wasn't for him really, he did a cyber security thing and now works in data governance. Which every company is going to need..I say go for it as it's free 😁. You don't know where it'll lead.