<p>^ I mean, you can probably get a mechanical engineering job where one of your primary job functions is programming. But you won’t beat out CompSci or SoftEng or CompEng majors for jobs at places like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, etc. with that kind of background… unless you do something spectacular in the meantime. If these are the kinds of places you want to end up, you need to sit through those CompSci classes to understand what you’ll be doing at work. If you want to work at a local engineering firm doing MATLAB or SimuLink or the like for, for instance, solving some problems iteratively or simulating some physical system, you’d be better served by doing MechEng.</p>
<p>Again, I have cautioned and will continue to caution people against thinking that they can have their cake and eat it too. It might be easier for someone without formal training in CompSci/SoftEng to break into the field than it is for someone with engineering training to break into that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean one is best served by actually doing it. If you know you want to get a general-purpose software engineering job, there are simply no better (read: applicable; in an ideal world I would agree that universities shouldn’t be glorified trade schools as they are now, but I digress) options.</p>