Ask HN: Career for someone good at making time-sensitive critical decisions?

Financial trader, although there is career risk from automation.

My previous job was as a Project Manager in a very fast-paced industrial fabrication shop. We generally promised 1-week from the time a customer sent us a set of shitty blueprints to the time the product is waiting to be picked up. That included making 3D models, getting parts from suppliers, fabricating the parts, powder coating them, quality assurance, etc. Some customers got 3-4 days.

Quite often with that tight of a schedule, something would go wrong in the supply chain and we'd be left trying to find an emergency solution. It sounds bad but it was a necessity of the industry we were in. It was often similar to a strategy game, having to plan several steps ahead and predict where the delays will come from, figuring out what you can change that will be faster to produce but will still fit within the customer's requirements.

> Time-sensitive critical decisions as a career sounds like guaranteed burnout.

More than burnout, it was the boredom of "lulls" in between time-sensitive critical decisions that got me.

In my pre-sales/post sales system engineering roles, I was routinely approached by leadership and teammates to "put out the fire" as they used to say. I enjoyed those kind of challenges but such instances were not that frequent, may be once a month, and I found the time in between such cases incredibly boring. But the high of solving a pressing problem and then relaxing for a while was very addictive and rewarding.

I expect that I might have burnout if I was dealing with such cases everyday but a few cases a month might not be that bad.

Air traffic controller, firefighter, emergency rescue worker, pilot, military or police.

Most of jobs like these are more about being able to make decisions under pressure than about being super smart, though.

Designated hitter in the MLB