11–20 of 66 posts
Serious "grass is greener" thinking going on in your post.
After leaving grad school for math after 4 years, I spent a hard 2 1/2 years looking for work in anything. Money was hard to come by, I lived primarily off of my Marine reserve pay - I had enlisted in the Marine Corps in hopes it would help me with direction, financial future, and improve my chances of attaining any career track job. While I can still appreciate purity to an extent, it stops there when you don’t have enough money but to eat only oatmeal for a week.
An aside, judging people for dress/class/language/etc. is pretty shitty - if you care about ideas, then surely these things are irrelevant, and there is some irony/contradictory attitutde being displayed by your words?
Lastly, a lot of some of the stated assertions are just flat out not true/shows immaturity/insecurity/depth on your side. I would spend some time reflecting on what matters to you as a person, aside from career. There is a lot of implicit inhumane comments made in the exposition defending your conclusion, and if you want to be a successful person, at the very least you should understand your desires/worldview and how your conclusions derive from them, correcting if there is any incongruity.
Maybe a career switch is indeed ultimately what you want - however, you should try understanding yourself before throwing away your years of study.
The schooling process is incredibly long and expensive if you want to become an MD and specialize beyond being a general practitioner, the hours absolutely suck until you become an attending, and the social capital of physicians is eroding as they are increasingly viewed more as code monkey service providers than intelligent domain experts.
Also the change to pay for performance vs pay for service and the introduction of more PAs and NPs with prescribing power is going to change practice as well to the detriment of MDs. I would say if you are very interested in helping patients then a career change into medicine is worth exploring; otherwise it's not worth it.
If you are more interested in biology vs patient care then perhaps you could consider translational research. There is HUGE demand for programmers in many biomedical engineering labs, research institutes, pharma and biotech, insurance, hospitals etc. I would kill to have an experienced dev to work with in my lab for example as most of the code I get stuck dealing with is utterly dog shit. If what you are seeking is social status, professionalism, and an opportunity to explore biology while making a difference then this might be a good route for you given your existing skill set.
Also even if you start out in a technical role, there are usually also non-technical career paths (If you think programming is too blue-colar) which you can explore from there.
(2) It's an over-generalization to believe that the best developers are awkward and socially inept. Do you have enough data points? The best developers are actually great collaborators who care more about the problem they're solving and the value it provides to users. Often that makes them stronger communicators and peers because they're working a team of other skilled people (designers, product managers, customer facing teams) to find the best, most impactful solution. I'd rather hire a 10-20% less skilled developer who has great communication & collaboration skills. Have you considered working at an organization where you could work with a larger team in place?
(3) It's becoming easier to learn to write code than ever before but that doesn't mean that the value of those skills is reaching asymptotic levels. In fact, I believe the bar is increasing: machine learning/AI, scaling large distributed systems, re-thinking how we'd build software as hardware improves and becomes cheaper, etc. Finding great engineering talent is still extremely scarce. I won't really comment on how you feel about one's appearance (I don't know why that matters) and communication style (pick a culture you like).
Human Machine Interaction is an art (or craft, if you prefer) not a science. So the size of the code dedicated to the user interface can easily be orders of magnitude larger than the fundamental business logic they interact with. So there will likely always be a lot more work there.
Then other areas of computing that are not deterministic yet are very scientific, like Data Science, which is probablistic as opposed to deterministic. Which is an almost 180 degree flip in your mental modeling.
The class sensitivity you exhibit is astonishing. Especially for someone your age. I really think you aught to do some soul searching there. Classism is an objectively bad thing to indulge in.
As far as the loneliness is concerned, well, deterministic work tends to be cut and dried and narrowly proscribed. So, say, writing a device driver for an OS will not require you to interact with people because the work can be specified exactly. Increasingly deterministic work will be outsourced to machines too. They're spectacularly bad at interacting with humans (just ask Alexa ;)