I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.

I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.

What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.

You can be nerdy about anything.

It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.

Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.

Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.