I feel like no matter what type of engineer you become there is always gonna be a bunch of ppl who you’re competing with. Perhaps someone are slightly more competitive than others like a devops person, but overall, i feel like the entire SWE field has become a commodity
Are there actually any software jobs that require a ton of schooling, or a ton of self education? Like literally years and years like you need to become a pediatrician or a lawyer
For example, consider computational research in a domain like healthcare: the job is to find new insights about patients or diseases that allow you to develop better treatments. Most of the time is spent on coding data analysis pipelines, but the truly vauable professional also knows enough about the domain that they are able to interpret the results, conduct follow up analyses and talk at eye level with medical doctors and biologists.