Software vs. Electrical

Uh, hardware is tangible (once fabricated), while software is ethereal (once coded). Together, software "drives" the hardware.

Just get started. Don't worry about which field in engineering. University is a great place to explore your interests. You will start with a bunch of basic foundational courses regardless of your engineering specialty. You can also try out those courses that are designed for "other majors". We used to derisively call them "EE for Dummies" or "CE for Dummies", etc.

Matters not what anyone else on this forum thinks regarding Pros and Cons, it only matters what YOU consider to be the Pros and Cons.

As for asking for money, you are most likely to get flamed here for that. Best of luck with your endeavors.

This guy is probably your best chance at Go Fund Me.

Awesome i appreciate the response and will keep that in mind.
I guess i should rephrase the question.
I am interested more in what the different types of engineers do on a daily basis from people who are in the field now. I would like to know if i'm more interested in one or the other.
I learned from past experience that there is a huge difference between what you do and learn in school vs the reality when you get in the field.
Something like What a day in the life of a "blank" engineer is like.
I am a mechanic and do allot of problem solving. Reproduce the concern, diagnose, replace/repair, and verify repair. Some common tools i use include Diagnostic computers, multi-meters and oscilloscopes.
Electrical is one i am leaning towards since i deal with it the most. But i am open to learning code. I have messed with python in the past but i was told to study C++ or Java.I deal with computers too whether it is the scan tool that i use to communicate on the vehicles CAN system or reprogramming a module due to faults in the code. Reprograming for us is basically flashing not really writing code.
One EE i spoke told me that Software engineers mainly write code whereas electrical engineers will deal with circuits and at some point learn to write code. is this true?

As for the last question, that's probably true in many cases. The point is, do something you love, not something that someone else says you will love.

If you like hands on work, chances are you will do more of that as a hardware engineer versus a software engineer. I do. I tinker at home. I do most, if not all the maintenance on my cars, trucks, and motorcycles. I'm as comfortable with a torque wrench as I am with an oscilloscope. Some of the software engineers at my defense contracting company do get involved with hardware during integration and test, but not to the degree that an electrical or mechanical engineer would. I am an electrical engineer with over thirty years on the job. Yet when the program needed some fixturing built in a short time, I became a carpenter/woodworker for a few days. It would have taken me much longer to generate plans and work with a carpenter to get it done. Never mind the clearance issues and sanitizing that would have to have been done.

There is no typical day and no typical engineering job. That is something I learned over the years. Engineering jobs can vary widely from company to company and even within a company. Be prepared that in many engineering disciplines, the majority of the work can be documentation. Good engineering requires a lot of it. I work in a smaller division of my company so our engineers tend to be more generalists because we have to be to get the job done. Other much larger divisions, engineers are more pigeon-holed and tend to be involved in just specific fields or specialties.

Ultimately, you will get a degree whose only job is to get you an interview. The degree tells a hiring manager that you have a foundation in engineering related topics and that you can LEARN. After your first job, no one even asks what classes you took or your GPA. They only care what you DID in you last job(s) and that your engineering degree was from an ABET accredited program. Find an engineering program that has project work. Those projects in school are of much higher interest to a hiring manager than any class you can take. The reason is because it shows if you can apply knowledge learned in the class and make something WORK. Book smarts only goes so far on the job. Intern at a company over summer break. That's another way to get some street cred.

Good luck with your quest.

Brave Sir Robin gave you a great deal of good advice in his post. You have to look first at what you really like to be doing, and match it with what the major offers. Remember also that in Electrical engineering there is a broad range of specialties on which you can focus. I began in digital circuits and computers (minicomputers and early days of microprocessors), and for a while worked with digital signal processing (radar & sonar applications among other things). Through various events I eventually ended up in electrical power engineering, so I went from 5VDC and nanosecond timing to kilovolts and amps AC. The equipment just got bigger, but many of the concepts are the same, and computers have permeated everything. You could focus on semiconductors. Or communications & signals. Or controls, biomedical applications, aerospace, or any of a number of other areas. Most of all, find something you enjoy doing, and have a great career!

That's how I got my degree.

Me too. Both of them.

IMHO There is a much greater demand for software engineers than electrical engineers. However, whatever you learn in school will quickly become obsolete and nearly useless. To keep abreast with the newest coding and programming languages will require being a perpetual student. This is part of the reason for the never ending demand for new programmers. The other reason is that there is not a good way to test all possible problems that software will encounter. Therefore all software will fail at sometime from a programming oversight. (Just look at the constant updates for every operating system.) There is also the annoying binary failure with software. When software works even a modest programmer has a good idea what the code is doing. Often when software fails not even the best programmer can explain why it died. Sometimes one cannot even examine the failing code to see what happened.

On the other hand, a clever electrical engineer can always perform some test to find the root cause of a hardware problem. It all depends on the cleverness of the engineer and the cost of the test equipment. However, every electrical engineer must know some programming today because an embedded processor resides in virtually everything today. When I did embedded processing the dominant language was C and C++ for micro-controllers. AFAIK these workhorse languages are still in use but micro-controllers are starting to fade for the highly flexible ASICS in many cases.

Your first year is probably almost if not exactly the same for both. Thus, you could probably flip a coin to get started. During your first year look around, ask questions, etc. and make a better informed decision. Changing your major near the end of the first year might be as simple as filling out a form and paying a nominal fee.

It would probably only add a year to get degrees in both majors. More options will be available to you than if you only selected one major.

Do both. I'm an EE that ended up writing software. There's a lot of crossover. If you concentrate on electronics, get as much software as possible and vice versa.

Jose, you could do both at the same time. Electronic Communication Engineering has a major of computer science.

To adopt such a blinkered approach so early does not bode well for the future. Have you ever heard of the expression "career-limiting behaviour"?