What major would be most helpful in getting a career in software development?

You would want to look at a degree in Computer Science as others have said or Electrical and Computer Engineering. Which one you choose will depend on what you want to work with.

Computer Science will teach you more higher level programing and development skills which would be more useful if you wanted to work as a software engineer and write computer programs, mobile apps, server code. Basically all the stuff that you see on a day to day basis, and the stuff they do at Twitter, Facebook, EA.

Electrical and Computer Engineering is more useful if you want to be dealing more with hardware design such as working at Intel or NVidia. It will teach you how circuit boards and embedded systems work, and how to program for them. Both, so called, hardware programming as in actually connecting wires to chips and interpreting the results as electrical pulses, and low level assembly programming.

Both degrees are interchangeable to some extent and will give you a shot at most jobs dealing with either one it's just that the focus of what you learn in college will be different so you might need to add some independent learning if you take one degree and decide to work in a field that is more related to the other degree.

Keep in mind you can usually switch between these majors a year or two in without much setback since they have a lot of overlapping classes, so pick one and take courses that are required for both to see what you prefer.

At community colleges and four year universities the discipline is usually called something like "computer science", but each school may be different. If you go to their course catalog online and look under "computers" or "technologies", read the descriptions of the classes and those for programming and/or software development will be easy to pick out from, let's say, hardware or networking. Good luck!

In my opinion, and experience, I would recommend a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. That gives you a wide variety of aspects of the Information Technology arena. It certainly has software design as a component, but it also allows you to understand the other areas of IT. In software development you will do a much better job if you understand the other aspects of your profession.

Networking knowledge is important to topic to be familiar with when writing software that will interact with other systems and not just run on a single computer. Understanding the inner-workings of database systems will aid you in accessing data in your software applications. So you see that you don't want to limit your learning to writing applications alone. The more knowledge you have of the overall IT environment, the better developer you can be.

Hi Nick, Computer Science is the most obvious major, but I suggest checking Colleges noted for being cutting edge in IT such as Carnegie Mellon, MIT, University of Illinois to check out their majors, minors and courses. Good luck!

https://collegegrad.com/careers/software-developers

Hi, above is a good link I found for you... I am copying in some information from the link below. I think as long as you take any computer science major with courses in software development, you should be OK. Your college advisors can help you more with this as well. Good luck!

How to Become One
Software developers usually have a bachelor's degree in computer science and strong computer programming skills.

Computer science, information systems, and mathematics degrees could lead you to software development. Computer science and information systems could give you broader skills for movement in many technology arenas. Many schools offer these types of degrees. Some schools do offer degrees in electronics engineering that could lead you in the direction of software develop from the programming languages in the curriculum.

You would need to check with each school that you are planning on attending, but Computer Science is what you are looking for. I attended University of Oregon and the Computer Science Major was all about programming and computer science theory.

<span style="background-color: transparent;">Collegeboard.org is a great resource for this! I poured through the pages of universities all over the U.S. when I was a senior in high school. Collegeboard was my go-to site! They put all of the information in one place and it is very easy to use. They even have various filters you can apply to see only colleges that have programs you are interested. To determine academic rigor, look at the admissions requirements, G.P.A. of past admitted applicants, SAT/ACT scores, class rank etc. This will give you an idea of what scores and grades you need to be accepted. However, don't be discouraged your application will be reviewed based on the full picture! College-board will help you get an idea of what is most important to the specific school you are applying to.</span>

This professional recommends the following next steps:

• <span style="background-color: transparent;">Chat with your Guidance Counselor</span>
• <span style="background-color: transparent;">Create a Collegeboard.org account</span>
• <span style="background-color: transparent;">Start using CollegeBoard as a resource to look up schools.</span>

Other people already mentioned Computer Science and Computer Engineering, but another major which can lead to a software development career is Mathematics. It's not as straight-forward, but it has a lot in common with Computer Science (they are both very mathematical), and there are always plenty of opportunities to learn the strict programming side of it on your own or within the math department.