WOW, talk about an open-ended question!

Brad, if you give a little bit more information in your posts you will tend to get more useful answers...your title to the post states 'career move' - what have you done, what are you currently doing? Why do you want to move?

The more you can focus your questions the 'better' the answers - although discussions invariably find tangents to disappear along!

All the best, HM

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary - William of Occam

The best career move would be to develop an operating system that is used by almost everyone and grows to dominate and overwhelm the entire market.

OS Market is saturated. IMHO. :)

The Australian Defence department has just put up $1.6Mil in grants for groups developing automated intelligent ground fighting robots.

If you are more of the domestic type Roomba hasnt really taken off. :)

 

A broad question attracts a broad answer.

Mobile phone and related industries are today's shooting star.

Medical/Military are unlikely to ever dry up.

 

- Steve

Some of the manufacturies in the power industry could sure use someone with a computer background.

Said another way, the existing computer products in the power industry really need someone who understands the computer aspect.

To me a "Computer Engineer" is the EE who designs the computer hardware.  The answers above assume that you are really a "Software Engineer" and your vague question seems to support this assumption since I can only think of a couple of fields where someone who designs computer hardware would be welcome (e.g., consumer electronics, industrial electronics, and military).

If what you do is write code, then the growth industries I see are telephone apps, field automation, and robotics.  Games are always being revised, but the tools have gotten so robust that a lot of that work is now done by techs.  

Industrial in-house general-use programming goes in and out of favor on a pretty short cycle so I wouldn't recommend a BP or Alcoa for long-term job stability.  On the other hand, embedded software in things like vehicles and consumer appliances is a huge and growing field since many companies change their products every year and the new stuff always takes new code.

David

thank you for your answers. yes, I know it is a vague question but I wanted to have a general idea about what field present a more stable (and lucrative)situation. (job wise)
Thank you again