Ask HN: How do you know if you're employable?

It depends on the company: not all are picky about your degree as long as you can show your skill. A common recommendation I have seen is to make a "project portfolio" that showcases the skills for the job you are interested in, and make a blog to explain these projects. It's about marketing yourself.

Lots of companies hire people with MS, or PhD in unrelated science or engineering field.

Simply that you get hired. It sounds simple, but getting a job, at the end of the day is a matter of having what an employer is looking for AND a big heaping of luck. Even seasoned experts can sometimes got 3-6 or even 9 months between jobs. Why? Blind stinking luck. Just don't stop applying.

Only you know what job it is you want, and only the employer knows if they will hire you. Certainly, some company out there will hire you, whether they meet your standards is the question.

My recommendation is to find a job that interests you and send a resume with an explanation that you're looking to make a change and hope they will let you know what more it takes, if anything, to get where you want to go. This can also be done less formally at meetups or online.

Having seen a few people make this transition, my guess is that you probably have abundant technical skills to take on anything, but will need to spend time understanding the work flow and business environment you'll be a part of. Just keep an open mind and go after what you want in your career.

Take a summer internship at a software company, or take a leave of absence from your program. You can easily get a 6month leave.

Also, ask yourself, do you enjoy programming? All the parts, working inside an editor, syntax, structure, getting all the code to compile properly, running and debugging errors etc... all of it..

Yes you can get hired. Do some leetcode.com problems.. as you are working on them ask yourself if you enjoy doing those.. that's how you'll get a job at most big software development companies.

If you did some courses on programming and data structure and can reasonably solve programming problems. Then getting into a software development job with a non CSE degree is not that difficult also a lot of companies will consider ECE as related stream to computer science, I did my undergrad in electronics engineering (similar to electrical in US) and my first job interviewers did not give any mind to my degree and asked some basic algorithm and data structure questions, everything else I learnt on my job. It is not unusual to feel inadequate to feel like you dont know anything when interacting with some of your peers at times,but often times I later realise I know more than what I thought initially about computer science.

Sorry for the pedantic response but the best way to know if you're employable is to solicit offers for employment by applying for positions you're interested in. You'll get valuable data in the form of response rate and possibly feedback on your resume/portfolio. Also, you'll get practice interviewing which is another skill entirely.

You're already extremely qualified. Do you already know how to program? If not or you're rusty, go do a course on Udemy or another online provider. They cost ~$15 on sale and are really good. Then get a job in software and learn it as you go.

For what it is worth, a PhD will probably open more doors than an MS. Both are credentials but the PhD is likely to make a stronger impression and make your application stand out.

If you're highly employable, recruiters should already be approaching you by now. When I was doing my degree, we often got a lot of email from the university faculty itself and there were also lots of job fairs targeting us.

When you're employable, recruiters will just keep knocking on you to emails and message apps asking if you're looking for another job yet or if you know someone.

A lot of recruiters seem to be getting lazy and focusing on LinkedIn these days though.

Try doing some informational interviews of actual software developers in person. This is the single best way to get some concept of what the job entails short of actually just getting hired to do it. Also, keep in mind that every job is different. Maybe Ruby on Rails in a small shop is a disaster for you, but Python at a corporation is an excellent fit.

I don't think the modern world does a very good job of helping people figure out how to find a good fit. Some people luck into it. Others just miserably muddle through. Others just fail entirely.

Unemployability is not just a question of skills and ability. Lot's of tech people find that they are not gratifying to their boss for various reasons. If you find that's the case for you, you should try to quickly transition to a job where you have clients rather than bosses.

One good option is to intern somewhere. We have a great software engineer who started as a PHD student in Chemical engineering. He found that he was interested in software development in the course of his work modeling CHE stuff. He started with us as an intern and then we offered him a SWE position. It’s been a year since he came on full time and so far everyone seems happy.

We offered him the flexibility of ~day a week to finish off his PHD until he graduates.

Good luck!

Aside: Are you sure you need a MS? I've known EEs switching to development with no need for a master's (edit: I see you can graduate with a MS with what you've studied now, makes sense to go for it).

Hands-on experience might help more than the master's (somebody suggested getting some Udemy or similar training - do complement with side projects).

I'd definitely finish the PhD. Also, there are software positions where knowing ECE might help.

Speaking as a hiring manager (single data point, grain of salt, etc), I'm much more interested in people's industry experience than their degrees. It depends of course on what type of software development work you're interested in doing. But of the dozen or so most productive developers I've worked with, only about half had computer science degrees. One hadn't finished high school.

I can get a lot more productivity out of someone self taught or with a bootcamp certificate and 18 months of real experience than I can out of someone fresh out of school with a masters in CS.

For people fresh out of high school, I tell them that the degree may get your foot in the door - but you already have an advanced degree in a related field. You may get further by getting an internship and producing a portfolio of work and side projects that prove you can do the work than you would by spending more time in school. You might even be able to find an internship you can do while completing your PhD, so you can explore the possibilities before committing.