Any Software Engineers or Programmers on here?

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I'm planning to go this route with graduate school and just wanted to know if it's a good career path for an aspie. I've been in Geographic Information Systems for the past 9-years and have enjoyed the field (mostly work on your own), but I need more of a challenge.

All input is most-appreciated.

There are a number of software engineers around these forums and you're going to get a wide variety of answers, based on some of the other similar threads that have been started. (I'd suggest doing a search All Forums for 'software'). One theme has been that it is increasingly difficult to do software in relative isolation anymore, leading to Aspie stress.

I have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and started writing a lot of C++, so I got more or less labeled as a software guy. My experience is that software is seeming to become increasingly routinized and requires increasing interaction. Also, since many software engineers are spur-of-the-moment people, this is leading, if you ask me, to frequent bouts of crisis management and putting out fires. Now that is NOT me, but it may be YOU, so if so, things might work. Also, I'm not someone who is fascinated with things like, "SpazzAttack version 2.1 is incompatible with the PissMeOff beta because of subordinately dereferenced access tokens", so my appreciation of software in general is limited, and this clouds my outlook.

Recently I dealt with job loss and have recently landed a new position, but I pushed hard to become labelled as a research type, using software when I have to, not an end to itself. I suggest you mix something of interest (geography, whatever) into the software and make sure that your new career will allow the solitude you liked in your old job.

I'm a programmer with courses from high school to university level to be able to get a job, but that's doesn't help a lot when you're interviewed by an NT who's first impression of you is 'Weird'.
Programming as a hobby is very common, I would guess, but you might face the same problems as I have, but then again, in that case you could face the same problem looking for any job.

I should add that I do work for the government, so I won't really be in the stressful private sector trying to compete in the software market. What we do at work is mainly customize existing software or create tools for our own specific needs. There is a bit of the software development process as far as gathering requirements, coding and testing, but we are not a "business" so to speak.

I would like to do programming/development within the Geographic Information Systems realm (and have created a few apps so far), so software engineering may be overkill. I'm not sure. The most difficult part of programming in our GIS software is trudging through the object model (ArcObjects) as it is HUGE and completely insane.

Based on what you said, here's my gut feeling:

Don't bother with grad school unless you're really certain that you're interested in it and it could lead to doing projects at work (wherever that is in the future) that will be more interesting to you.

It sounds like you have a good situation at work: relatively low stress, ability to mold and control things with the software (sense of control important for us aspies). It sounds like THAT is what you really like, and any important decisions (school, career) should be based on how it enhances that part of your work life.