> The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about EE topics and wondering where I would be today if I would have found out more about this discipline vs going a more traditional administration/IT route.

I wonder if the EE folks wonder other way around?

EE here. Not really about admin/IT. But I do wonder sometimes if I should have done software as a career. Mostly it's a grass is greener feeling when I hear about the high end of the salaries. But I do very well financially, the jobs are stable, and I write cool software to solve my own problems, rather than grinding on someone else's Jira tasks. I do lots of IT and computer admin stuff too, but also on my own terms. Setting up simulation clusters, remote hardware automation, development environments, storage, etc... so much so that our department hired a guy to take on some of that work.

Another EE here. I suspect that there is a lot of "greener grass" going on (oh look! I spy with my little eye, grass beginning with G). I've been doing software dev for most of the past quarter century. My current hobby is Eurorack synthesis and I build/solder about half of the items from DIY kits. The ones that I'm mostly into are built around STM32 microcontrollers (I threw out all my C/C++ books about 15 years ago - oops!).

The future is here for STM32: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs