Why did you decide to switch to medicine?
More of really falling in love with this career rather than not enjoying my previous one. A long story, but suffice it to say it was a fun and good career. I am very early in my training, but so far, I'm enjoying it.
And to the original poster:
Also, as many people have pointed out, you can't hold up a fantasy ideal and expect that to be your reality. Saying you'll be the next startup millionaire after finding a group of geniuses burning the midnight oil for a few years is like telling someone to go into medicine so they can get that integrated plastics spot at Harvard and then they'll become the Surgeon General after a few years.
It doesn't work that way. You have to look at what the majority of people do with a coding background. Someone suggested this before in this thread, which I thought is an amazing idea. Go pick an open source app, like Firefox or maybe a linux app or a distribution - look at all the open bugs there are, and go fix a bunch of them for the next six months. See how you enjoy that. I
did enjoy things like that, hence I was happy in my previous career. But it's a far cry from the abstract math algorithms that you learn in school, or the fantasy of the exciting collaborative environmental of a garage-startup.
This is anecdotal, so please take it with a grain of salt, but most of my friends from college who went out into the more exciting fields like game development are either miserable, or doing something else after a few years of burning out. Working insane to meet a deadline and constantly watching your job because if you fall behind or want better hours, there's always a freshly minted CS grad with fantasies of working on his favorite video game waiting to take your spot....
I was lucky I never had the fantasy and so chose a stable (and hence not very 'exciting') career. My process of developing a cool new algorithm when the need arose was the google search bar. Just check and see if anyone has done and made it available for people to use (hint: they have, and, hint #2: no, you're not smart enough to make it substantially better)....the rest of the time it was aligning text and making sure data integrity was maintained, and going through all the bugs, and testing to make sure criteria were met, merging various versions of code, etc, etc
I am not telling you what to do - I think software engineering is an awesome career. You have to make that decision. But I would just caution that based on reading your post, I don't think you have an accurate depiction of what the day to day life is like for
most people in the field. I would first make sure of that - by the various criteria I and others suggested (esp. the go fix some bugs part), or if those are beyond your technical capabilities, go and add little features to those applications (usually those are easier than debugging since you don't have to understand previous code that may be written at a higher level), and keep working until some of those features are accepted (hint: first time they'll just laugh at your amateurish attempt and reject it outright...but be humble, keep learning, and keep trying).
I hope these help. As I said, I'd be happy to talk more about it. I worked for a while in the industry so I know a little bit about it (though as I've mentioned, not at a place like Google, designing their search algorithm....to do that, don't do software engineering...go get a PhD in math....).
