Hey, I'm also a former civil engineer-turned SWE in the NJ/NYC area! Nice to know that there are more of us out there. I already spend hours looking through Wikipedia articles, so when your site dropped I was on it right away. I dodged the AI conversation entirely by getting into a state government position where my job is all but guaranteed by the union.
I've always held a passing curiosity about civil engineering; have you ever seen someone make the reverse switch? Or, is the career of a SWE simply that much more enviable?
In addition to what the other commenter said, my main gripe with it was that it felt a tad bit racially discriminatory (only speaking from my own experience). I'm not a white man, and I worked in towns with predominantly white populations. I received a lot of undue complaints, and I ended up getting shunted to night shift work before I made the switch.
Also the pay as a civil engineer with 3 years of experience was roughly half what I ended up making my first year as a software engineer.
There are some. If you're married with kids and what you really need is stability above all else it's a decent idea.
But civil has serious issues (very low pay for how high the legal liability is).
If you search for jobs in civil you'll see hundreds of civil engineering firms are desperate for people to hire - it's similar to accounting where there's a mass exodus.
That may be a blog post in and of itself, why that industry is struggling and what that means.