So basically I am asking, what other occupation would the programmer's mindset and programmer's aptitudes lend themselves effectively to?
Most likely I'd be doing sales though. I discovered I was pretty damn good at sales but the programming jobs never stopped coming in. It was just a matter of taking the job that paid better and requires less commuting.
A third career option would have been cooking. I almost went into this, it seemed pretty easy to make millions of dollars on. I consulted restauranteurs who were making millions of dollars in revenue a year. They basically told me I'm an idiot -- running a business was a prison, like having kids. They'd pick up tech jobs if they could.
I like writing code, but stories/selling is definitely not my thing. I wonder what it is that makes this resonate:
> I can't learn code from docs, but pick it up fast from examples.
They were right, restaurants are the biggest money pits and be sure to thank them on Xmas with a card for allowing you to focus on other aims as so many were destroyed during COVID. As for cooking... no one makes millions from cooking, ever. You have to become a celebrity chef and stop cooking and become a one man Media and PR team and sale books or do tours/TV which is the furthest thing you'd want if you actually enjoy working line (being part masochist I actually did).
I enjoy writing scripts/pilots/short stories, and have experience coding but it's not something I enjoy or like: I find it a reductionist and often tedious task I was forced to learn to code because I couldn't convince anyone to build me what I needed when I launched my fintech startup. How did you overcome this, coding doesn't seem creative at all by comparison.
I'm only coming back to coding after a ~4.5 year hiatus and study CS (AI/ML) but the truth is I'm struggling to find the motivation and I think I'll probably end up in product management more than being a developer and consultant: I'm just glad I chose python back then since all of the AI and ML stuff is using it.
There's patterns in writing, just like music and code. Creativity comes with playing within the restrictions. That's literally how poetry works; you're limiting words into some artificial form.
I love mobile development because it has some fairly extreme restrictions -- everything from screen size to operating system restrictions. These days you're also dealing with feature flagging plus dropped connections, with longer app review periods. Plus tons more restrictions like tests, low end devices, lifecycle, and Google/Apple being schizophrenic.
I think the real hit to creativity is not the work itself, but the process. Our team doesn't have project managers or scrum masters. Product tells us what users want, we tell them the cost.
My team goes even more extreme - no style documents, no naming convention, and architecture is just a shared document that everyone edits. It's like a band. Someone plays a rhythm or riff and the others play around it. Git blame shows that some of our classes have been edited by 4 different people. Each module appears to have a unique, inconsistent style, but it becomes like the varied songs of an album.
I do many academic-type things. I teach sometimes. So, if I were not in research and engineering at industry, I would be working full time at a university. I would still write code, do math, etc.
If that were not viable (either too high paper bar or very low pay), I would be in public administration or be a police officer. I can naturally lead people from the get-go, and have other people skills, I am a very good stage performer, too. Public speaking never frightened me. I can write. Honesty matters a lot to me: to a level that I am sometimes labeled naive and impractical.
I am sure I would make a very good salesman, too. If there's a third world war, and the tech companies, unis are bust, and money, stocks all go to the dogs, I would become a salesman. It is a doomsday scenario. I have been good at fundraising for charities. I am confident that I can sell if I want to.
I am very attracted and regular consumer and creator of poetry, paintings, recitations, movies. Yet, these don't pay even s**. Would never become this. I would have to take normies' opinion seriously to sell more, scale more. Would be soul-sucking. Won't become a professional artist, ever. When I do art now, I don't give a damn what the normies think. I would like to keep it that way. Forever.
I just want to point out that calling people “normies” is one-dimensional categorization. I loved reading your self reflections until you got to the point where you chose to classify a huge chunk of the population as one-dimensional and unworthy of your consideration.
Yes I chose to do it.
I lived too close to them for too long.
I still have PTSD about them.
Vast swathes of people are indeed too simplistic. They want to watch the Rock, Vin Diesel, and want to mindlessly watch sports for hours, and they browse tik tok and stupid stuff on fb. They will go batshit with you if you don't agree with their politics.
I have seen these people.
You can ride on your high horse and tell me that my mind is limited.
But I have seen them.
Don't want to be in a position where I have to depend on their taste for my livelihood.
I do not hate them. But their hoard is something I am legitimately afraid of.
Note: I have seen rich normies with "high" education. I have seen people of proper culture from impoverished background who had no college education.
Or "a person".
As to the other question: In my observation the following areas have some overlap with a programmer's mindset:
- Legal: Particularly things like patent and copyright law.
- Technical writing, fact-checking, and scientific illustration
- Academia or labwork in chemistry or physics
- Chemical or electrical engineering
Philosophy is a nice parallel. Paul Graham is notable for being both philosopher and programmer.
For someone who did like reading code, they would be more suited to patent or copyright law.
>So basically I am asking, what other occupation would the programmer's mindset and programmer's aptitudes lend themselves effectively to?
Although it's what I'd be if I weren't a programmer, I think artist is actually at odds with the programmer's aptitudes and mindset. In the words of one of the greatest programmers:
"It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless"
- Alan Kay on programming
Which I once aspired to be but never got there.
So, although we'd have to get used to working on our feet and sweating (aka doing "real work") I suspect many programmers have the mindsets to be professional cooks. They might not have the talent to invent new things as a chef does, but they could certainly become competent line cooks.
The skills I have are those I've developed _as_ a working programmer, less so those that I brought to the job. So this isn't really answering your question. If I'd never become a software engineer, I'd never have developed a programmer's mindset or attitudes.
I'd probably be a electrician or electrical engineer. I worked as an (electrician) apprentice for a year, then went to school and got my (electrical) engineering degree.
On one side - if I had continued to work as an EE, I'd probably have a much higher salary right now. But I find analytical work more rewarding, and electrical engineering work can be a bit tedious IMO. I'm lucky with my work right now, as every week tends to be different - I'm not really cut out to become a specialist, where one continues to become more and more specialized in some niche.
The human body is the machine we wish we could make, but one we also don’t understand enough to master.
Not sure how closely that's connected to programmer aptitudes, I may be getting away with that despite not being particularly good at it. And I don't actually have any library science background so I may just be imagining my fit for that.
Based on that, I think being a therapist or psychiatrist might have been a good choice for me.
I dual majored EE and CS and like EE more than programming, so EE seems like a natural fallback, but I was nowhere near as good at electronics compared to software.
I've enjoyed programming, being a system administrator (now called DevOps), and being a machinist (making gears). You're a tool maker and user, as are we all... there are many types of tools to make or use.
Artist, as others have said... there's really no limit.
I don't get how your brains work.
Finding problems to solve programmatically just escapes me when I can just be in the loop and do it myself.
I'd waste so much time if I approached every problem that way... But then that's just for me personally. professionally I'd go to you guys to make my life smoother at work, if I worked.
Although I'm starting to get PowerShell and Python and Power Automate Desktop for automating things I'd usually do myself, manually, over and over.
These days I'm less of an angry teenager and my family is no longer in poverty. If I was looking for an alternative I might go the commercial pilot route. I should be able to do that without going into significant debt.
I've been writing poems and short stories through high school.
What I would possibly ended up being: unemployed.
I understand everything visually. Thinking about code is basically me visualizing and exploring some kind of abstract structure representing the architecture of my program.
As a real estate agent, I can tell you the 80/20 rule is strong in this field. The majority of people are grossly unqualified and do the work poorly, while the skill of the remaining 20% will absolutely pay off for you in terms of efficiency and financial outcome.
It's a double-edged sword where on one level it's great that it is an accessible profession, but on the other it is too important in terms of the impact to people's lives to be a license you can pull out of a Cracker Jack box. By and large, that's what it is, and unfortunately few members of the general public really do any research on their agent and state agencies are pretty lax in any kind of enforcement. Above all else, I'd encourage people to really interview their agent, get to know their business strengths and weaknesses, and don't just hire them because "they seem nice."
Case in point: In my market there is a guy who has been an agent for decades. Takes pictures with his phone, which are always out of focus, turned sideways, and he always ends up with a toilet seat up or something else just gross. Dude gets a ton of listings, which sit and sit and sit on market even for as strong as things have been the past few years. The guy has no business being an agent with that kind of crappy representation of his clients, yet he gets a lot of business because he's slapped a lot of backs and shook a lot of hands. Until the general public gets smarter about who they are hiring, they will continue to get poor outcomes - and that's really sad.
I've also discovered my passion for math, finally, even though I'm not supposed to be good at it. graph theory, topology, abstract algebra etc. but I'm not sure I would have gotten there since I believed I was bad at it growing up.
- Einstein
I enjoy cooking, maybe a cook. But I also hate how much time it consumes of the day, the whole shopping and cooking ritual every day.
Idk if I'd enjoy it doing professionally. In school I picked the cooking and uh.. housecare, like knitting and all that? class instead of the technics class, because I didn't like doing physical work. Nice side effect, all the girls were there too and I got to cook and bake delicious stuff instead of boring holes into wood or sawing or all the boring uninteresting stuff I never cared about.
All the boys were interested in cars, I didn't care about them. Care were just tools in my book. I guess I'm a feminine man, altough I certainly look like a bear. Or maybe I just pick the way of least resistance or shall I say with most benefits.
In retrospect all the friends and contacts said "you're doing it right".
I just had to think about it today, I had a friend how did everything "the way it should be done"TM. Finished base school, was a trainee, got a proper job, invested in house savings, went to church, etc.
I was the complete opposite. Rebel. Went to 5 schools, got kicked out of training, never got a drivers license, did drugs and tried the life of the party and entertainment. I was a looser, still am kind of, if you go by his criteria. Then I landed a programming job in 2001 and earned 150% of what this former friend was earning lmao. He hated me foe that I believe. He was so jealous.
Well my records got stolen and I never continued my DJing and music career. So I had to go with the other thing I knew, computing. I was cracking games at the age of 12 and wrote and linked cracktros in asm on the c64 at the age of 13. That became less relevant in my mid teens where I just loved scratching, rap music, classical music, any kind of music. I started composing on the Amiga with Fasttracker. But well since this path ended later... I was one of the first people to write cheats for the 1st MMORPG Meridian 59 and learn about all the principles, networking, objects, inhertiances and whatnot.
When no one wanted to employ me I became self-employed, learned PHP MySQL HTML CSS Linux. Created websites with adsense on them, had a shared hosting company.
Nowadays I'm almost back to square one, only with the knowledge to create in the "virtual world". And I ask myself what else would I do? I don't know. It's the question I've been asking myself. If I had a driver's license, I'd drive stuff or people from A to B. But that would get boring eventually, because I sometimes really love to create and build, only not physically.
What instead? I have a talent for languages. Maybe gardening? But that's physical work. I'm good at delegating. You do this, you do that, Yes boss. But I hate leading. Idk, I really don't know. Maybe I should produce music again.
I development I'm motivated by the new problem that needs to be solved. I'm not interested solving the same problem again and again. I don't enjoy only frontend or only backend. It needs to be both. I love seeing things grow, but not too slowly. Ideally I would not work and live off investment returns, but I don't have that kind of money.
Oooh I remembered I really loved book-keeping activa saldi I enjoyed that very much.