Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
Well said, Zed. Very well said indeed.
In what fields is this true? What is the metric of "better off?" More money? More "respect?"
Examples I've seen are people in marketing departments who can write a little python script and suddenly analyze hundreds of thousands of data points. Or someone who combines thousands of geo-targeted data points to better decide where to open chain x's new store.
Traditional companies are structured so that there's a "marketing" team and a "business intelligence" team of dba's-cum-statisticians. 90% of the time, if the marketing person doesn't ask the perfect question, they don't get a useful answer - and the BI person is on to their next task.
The coder can both ask the question, generate the data and then iterate based on the results of the output. Hugely powerful and can't be done by 90-95% of people in most companies.
I saw another website once -- e-commerce in a niche y'all are uninterested in -- where, among numerous other problems, someone was about three lines of PHP away from adding six figures of revenue to the business, because the person who set up the website thought that title tags had to be the same sitewide because they didn't have time to rewrite each of the XY,000 pages individually.
And better off would either be more free time, more money or more status (however you define that). Pick one.
Saying that, if I could install anything more pleasant than VBA I'd probably be happy.
I guess, in other words, our "day to day work" is "helping out with any trivial task someone would like to automate", though I personally wouldn't phrase it that way :)
Deploying software written in Matlab that other people can use is a nightmare.
Biology: You can catalog and simplify your workflow by breaking things up and correctly keeping them all organized while doing things the fast way.
Author: You create smart searches, web spiders, pattern recognition (to capture your repetitive sections) and you learn formatting. Additionally, the text editor skills are very nice for some types of writing.
Automotive/Racing: Calculating gear ratios? Analyzing race data? Optimizing pit stops? Not everyone is a formula one racer.
Small Businesses: Automated Scheduling of Clerks/floorpeople, inventory managment, loss detection.
Fashion: Modeling (no pun intended) cloth usage by shape cuts, number of seams required, etc.
Notice how weird that is? If you like programming, why are you doing something else? If you don't, why would you add programming to your duties as a race car driver? OK, if you really love both, do both.
Otherwise, you're just wasting time that you should be working on your actual job by piddling around in related programming projects. You're probably being mediocre at both instead of good at one.
It's not weird to like more than one thing. It's also not weird to look at all of the areas you enjoy working in and make a combination of them work. This is what allows us to make a unique contribution.
Because if you know even a little, it goes a long ways in other fields. And honestly, a huge number of programming jobs SUCK. I mean, it's a field specifically excepted from overtime laws!
>why would you add programming to your duties as a race car driver?
Because you want to race better? And it's not the driver who I know who does this (it's actually motorcycle racing), but instead some of the pit crew who does. Even hooked up a neato GPS thing for the racer.
>Otherwise, you're just wasting time that you should be working on your actual job by piddling around in related programming projects
Spoken like someone who's never worked outside of software development. If your job is "select the 10 best properties to turn over", you job could very well include "write software to help do that". If your job is "Make sure this data is sane", you can most likely write some software to help the process along, decrease repetition, and otherwise make you look awesome.
Teacher: create randomized, self-grading quizzes from a test bank of question templates; optimize the dickens out of your grading work flow; check for cheating on assignments
More respect - oh yes.
More money - we think so. The early signs are good.
More low hanging fruit in terms of satisfaction or directly helping your users improve their life - most definitely!
BTW, " if you want to make about the same money and be happier you could actually just go run a fast food joint." is certainly not true in my case, and I suspect in many cases.
I do think "You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession." has a lot of truth to it, although again, it depends on the individual.
Money is really just a form of freedom. If people are free to do what they want, they will be happy; if not, they will be miserable.
Instead of reading it as discouragement to become good at programming, I'd read it as encouragement that it can be used in the other things you are interested in. You don't have to be "a programmer". It's an important point.
He showed me I think more than 20 prints of web apps that he had visited, and on each one he sometimes typed his login, sometimes searched for a number, other times the name of the person, other with his state of residence. He could have reduced his typing to just one.
Also, if you don't believe this particular anecdote, I have dozens more. I've built web apps for law offices during 4 years. And when I left the company the TODO list for what I was working on was still huge. Absurdly huge. Software is never done.
Programming manages information and reduces repetitive computer tasks, and lots of professionals have this problem.
Now, should the owner of a fast food restaurant learn to code? Maybe not. Should he hire someone that knows how to code? Maybe not. Should he buy somekind of software to manage his operations? For sure.
But it's the same necessity: There's a problem, you can either solve it yourself or pay someone else to do it. And the problem is managing information and time.
Sheesh, don't you know anything?
If you cared to hear my explanation, I'd tell you. (it involves a burrito...)
"I'm not a [programm]er, I'm just [programm]ing!"
Programmers know a whole lot about... programming. Some people therefore write development tools, IDEs, text editors, compilers, operating systems, and databases. This seems to me a relatively small niche, though. Commercial development tools often live and die by free and open-source competition.
Otherwise, without actual domain knowledge, a programmer becomes a tool for people who do possess this knowledge. Typical programming jobs suck because they boil down to pushing data from point A to point B, while transforming it in a way specified by someone else. For example, in the financial industry, a non-quant programmer is just a cog. Possibly a highly intelligent and competent cog, but still never the person who designed the underlying process. On the other hand, a quant with programming ability actually has a chance to do something original. Even traditional "computer sciencey" work is rarely just about programming. Computational biology, computational geometry, robotics — those are real fields, where programming helps solve problems.