Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

Film maker. I'd like to write and direct short films (initially -- maybe moving to feature length later). Maybe also write and produce plays.

Until that happens, I think the next step is to write and produce a play at my local theater.

8th grade science teacher. In a private school, where I can use lots of fire.

I figure if I can inspire one or two pupils into truly understanding thermodynamics, maybe -they- could change (or save?) the world. Doesn't seem like I'm going to.

I would choose to be a physical therapist. You to to actually move around all day and also help people and interact with them. Also great potential for research as this is a developing field. Sure would beat starting at a screen all day long, takes about 5 years to train though, 3 full time in school and then would take several more years to match software engineer salary.

I would choose to be a physical therapist. You get to actually move around all day and also help people and interact with them. Also great potential for research as this is a developing field. Sure would beat starting at a screen all day long, takes about 5 years to train though, 3 full time in school and then would take several more years to match software engineer salary.

All the carpentry-as-an-alternate-career comments here reminded me of something Fred Brooks wrote in his "The Mythical Man-Month" -- how he described programming, reminds me of carpentry (note: it's a quote from the book all the way from here):

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (...)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.