I'm planning to study pharmacy at the University of Toronto:
http://www.pharmacy.utoronto.ca
Do you think I am making a mistake?
Pharmacy pays better than most software jobs, is more stable, has a more flexible schedule, has plenty of jobs outside of places where a shitty little house costs a million bucks, and the process of becoming a pharmacist is not nearly as hellish as the process of becoming a researcher (as an undergrad I decided I didn't want to go to grad school, and I didn't even have a family that couldn't possibly be supported by a grad student's miserable stipend). My program is 3 years and does not involve being a professor's slave.
I don't see why I would prefer to become a software engineer anyway. Both involve programming, but a startup founder solves his own problems while software engineers solve somebody else's. To me, that's a critical difference.
Anyway, I admit I would have preferred to have become a successful startup founder, but other than that pharmacy is about as good as it gets. There's a reason that 16 applicants were rejected for every one that was accepted to my program, and it's not because the career is only slightly preferable to shoveling shit in Louisiana.
Come on yc'ers, get some humor!
For the past few weeks I too have been feeling distraught with my life in computing, but a few weeks is hardly enough to toss out the past 16 years of working and studying to be a software engineer. Maybe someday I will change careers, but it ought not be a quick decision.
You should study Life Sciences at University of Toronto instead. Guaranteed to launch your career forward.
You lack determination.
It might also be your approach. Woz advises youngsters using computers to get some form of immediate success to avoid the negative feedback loop you describe. So carefully look back at what you are doing and see if you can choose projects, problems that have a quicker positive pay-off.
Choosing to do pharmacy does not necessarily mean you will avoid computers.
Anyway, it is true that I am sick of failure after failure. But I have no other career choice given my personality: I have to be in control of my own destiny and have been in love with computers for a quarter of a century.
Most of my work and education has been in software, but I am also a professional musician, an avid photographer, and have significant interests in linguistics, politics, U.S. history, and education. One of the funnest jobs I've ever had was scoring open-ended essays written by grade-school students.
I don't see why a programmer couldn't develop an interest in pharmaceutical work.
"In their traditional role, pharmacists typically take a request for medicines from a prescribing health care provider in the form of a medical prescription and dispense the medication to the patient and counsel them on the proper use and adverse effects of that medication. In this role, pharmacists ensure the safe and effective use of medications."
Sounds like fun.
There are pharmacists that work in ICU's (Intensive Care Units) and hospital departments as part of teams where they play a pretty significant role and interact with surgeons and other doctors. They are the go to individuals when it comes to drug compatibility and whether a patient can withstand a specific drug. I've seen it first hand, and it looks far from boring, not to mention the fact that in the end, they're working to help increase the quality of people's lives.
You would assign important decisions about your medical care to the sole discretion of a Java program written by a committee of outsourced developers that don't know or care any more about pharmacy than, say, you?
It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience with serious illness. Congratulations, and may you remain healthy for as long as possible!
Also, people have multiple doctors, who prescribe multiple things... often using handwritten notes. There's no standard for medical records exchange, and if there is half the doctors aren't using it, so the receptionists tend to hand you a questionnaire and ask you for the names of all your drugs. If you fill out that form wrong... well, let's just say that the pharmacist may be one of the few people with an up-to-date, accurate, computerized list of what you've been taking. For my elderly relatives, each of whom is taking a veritable salad of drugs, I just carry a sheaf of the pharmacy's printouts and copy them directly onto the questionnaires.
And, in practice, people ask medical questions of whoever is in front of them at the time.
The only thing here I actually would want the pharmacist to do is ask the questions.
The rest of it should be done by computer, and in fact some of it already is (checking for drug interactions). People sometimes forget stuff, whereas a database doesn't. People are sometimes mislead by experience/spurious correlations, while a properly designed computer system won't be.
So I would, in fact, assign important decisions about my medical care to a java program written by a team of doctors, pharmacists and computer geeks.
Well, sure. I'll go ahead and grant you that. But asking the right questions is a very important, very difficult art. The answers depend on which questions are asked, and how.
People sometimes forget stuff, whereas a database doesn't.
True, and lots of mistakes are made because of inadequately systematized drug dispensing systems. But I'm not saying that your pharmacist shouldn't be highly augmented by powerful computer technology. Just that there's going to be a human pharmacist in that loop for the foreseeable future.
There are drugs that don't require pharmacists: we call them over-the-counter drugs. Maybe someday our computers will get so good that every drug will be OTC... but I'm not an optimist. At some point designing drug cocktails becomes an art: There's no optimum to seek, because there are a number of different goals that one could pursue and tradeoffs one could make. That takes an artist -- a consulting artist, like an architect or a decorator. And that, in turn, takes serious social skills that computers don't have.
More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags.
Truer words were never posted on this site.
Even though this is "hacker news", it really seems like a small subset of hackerdom. Seems like every other hacker wants to write the next paradigm changing Web 2.0 social networking new media mobile app looking for a market while 7 million small and medium sized business owners would rather chew razor blades than spend one more day with their current software.
People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?
I think there are two reasons:
Hackers tend to be male computer geeks who majored in CS or something like that, and they write for markets that they understand, so they're mostly concentrated in the same markets because they understand the same things. Even within the Web 2.0 sphere lots of markets are ignored. Here's an example of a site that serves knitters: https://www.ravelry.com/account/login They've been around for less than a year and they have over 100K users. I only know about them because my wife knits. They have (or had when I checked it out several months ago) essentially no competition, because the intersection of people who are interested in hacking and knitting consists of very few people. IIRC it was written by the husband of a knitter.
Second, dealing with businesses is kind of daunting. I think I could write better software than my pharmacy has in a matter of months, but I would either have to sell it to risk-averse PHBs who don't understand technology or start my own mail-order pharmacy. Just writing some web app and putting it up has a far lower activation energy, even if there is more competition and the market is ultimately smaller.
But if you know your market and are comfortable dealing with these businesses, you're in a great position. I can't imagine that any software would be boring if it's for your own startup.