I am hoping to transition into the IT/development field and am expecting to star

Question

I am hoping to transition into the IT/development field and am expecting to start classes this summer. I come from a teaching background, but have also done freelance web development as a hobby for a few years and really enjoyed it. I'm having trouble deciding which of two schools to attend (one focuses on general web development technologies and the other focuses on high-level programming/software engineering principles). I think my biggest trouble is that I'm somewhat aware of what it's like to develop websites, but I've never experienced what it's like to engineer software for a professional organization. The S.E. program sounds more rigorous and very interesting, but I'm not entirely sure if Software Engineering would be a better fit for me.

I've heard that there are a lot of similarities between web development and software engineering (some people say they are the same thing), but I am curious as to whether there are any general fundamental differences in the day to day activities/experiences between the two fields.

For instance:

Do web developers have to generally balance many projects whereas software engineers generally focus on one bigger software application?

Do engineers generally spend more time meeting, researching and planning for projects than web developers need to?

Are there differences in the typical sizes of each department/team and the number of people you have to interact with?

Is there more flexibility/opportunity for growth in one position than the other?

These are just examples of questions that I have that may distinguish one position from the other. If anyone could help provide information to help me identify if either option is a better fit for me (or even if there is a difference at all), I'd greatly appreciate it.

Explanation / Answer

Do web developers have to generally balance many projects whereas software engineers generally focus on one bigger software application?
It varies a lot according to what sort of projects you're working on. Large projects require in-depth focus, but many software engineers work on very small projects.

Do engineers generally spend more time meeting, researching and planning for projects than web developers need to?
Senior developers (whether labelled as web developers or software engineers) spend a lot more time meeting, researching and planning than junior developers. One of the key features of being a senior developer is a much greater focus on understanding what the customers really want and need, and that totally means more time spent not coding.

If you want to spend your days doing nothing but write code, stay a junior (and have much less control over what you do too).

Are there differences in the typical sizes of each department/team and the number of people you have to interact with?
I'd be very surprised if there was.

Some projects are very heavily based around web delivery and that's where a web developer would be absolutely central. Others have little to no web component, and there's a spectrum between the two extremes. This is disjoint from project size though, and project size is correlated pretty strongly with the size of teams involved. (I'm sure you can think of large web-driven systems and large non-web systems; there are plenty of all sorts of small project too.)

Is there more flexibility/opportunity for growth in one position than the other?
There's lots of flexibility in both. I would advise not worrying about it.

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