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Comment by GianFabien | Hacker News Reader

"translating client requirements to prompts" (specifications until recently) is exactly what business analysts do and it is amongst the best paid IT jobs. Project managers and security consultants typically earn even more.

In my experience, in both business and academia, bullshit intolerance is a severe career limiting trait.

With your aptitude for physics and mathematics, have you considered some other field of engineering? In all fields of engineering strong programming skills are a strong form leverage for your core work. A friend of mine was in a similar situation to yours many years ago. He choose surveying and he is now the owner of a substantial company, making a comfortable living.

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> In my experience, in both business and academia, bullshit intolerance is a severe career limiting trait.

How very well said.

I've craved a book describing the alienation of the engineer, how strange it is to be so well connected to such self-speaking details, to be such a hyper-critical beast on the hunt for issues, a monster at scoping out problems & understanding their bounds, at evaluating possibility. And being trapped in a world where so much around us can feel like bullshit, like a removal of information, only making things vague. Where so many goals & intents seem detached & decoupled.

This simple phrase rather puts a pin on some of the difficulty of life as a developer.

I don't have many recommendations to explain or explore The Most Important Life Aspect Of Being A Programmer, which you've so very really captured imo. Ellen Ullman's Close To the Machine (`97) is a relatively-early memoire that has some very nice capturances of this weird world, of the life of being a machine-speaker, a truth-finder, apart from the rest of the adrift weird world. Haven't picked it up but her new book (Life In Code, `17) yet. I really crave a lot more discourse on this. This is the most undersung reality. Programmers & would-be/could-be programmers should know. The world should know.

Thanks for your response.

I have considered other engineering fields. My school also specialises in engineering, many of my friends are studying it, and many areas of it interest me. Nuclear, electrical, and aerospace all interest me. I'd like to learn more about them, and I'm planning to talk to some of the engineering teachers about it.

This isn't the first comment saying that programming can be useful as part of another field. What would the route be into that kind of work? Would it be a normal engineering route and adding "Proficient at xyz" to your CV?

If there are any career nights with invited engineers from those fields, then I suggest you attend them and ask questions. If not, then discuss with your careers advisor (I think UK schools have them. It's a thing in Australia) and find out whether such invitations could be extended or even field trips organised.

During your university education you will be required to solve many problems and some might be better done with some programming skills. You might need to use MatLab, etc for simulations. During this time you will gain experience with the sorts of problems that programming / CS / data science even AI could assist with. These days every field of engineering is a heavy user of computers and requires a wide variety of programming skills.

As for your question about what to include on your CV. I recommend the structure of: have solved xyz problem for abc using plx. That is, the CS aspect is the least important. The most important is the problems you have solved and the benefit / value generated. This is a far better way to demonstrate proficiency than listing a bunch of acronyms.

Good luck with your university experiences.

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