I'm disappointed that the list focusses entirely on technical roles and ignores careers completely opposite to software development. I think a programmer would make a good mechanic, electrician, or plumber from the debugging skills alone.
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Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck trying to leverage software engineering experience to move into the trades like plumbing or mechanic work. You'll probably be laughed at, and then you'll start at the entry level just like everyone else.
IMO a bad idea anyway - as a software dev, even a bad one, you can create more value for more people at the same time. As a plumber you're only fixing one thing for one person at a time so there's a hard limit on how valuable that is.
Tell that to literally any hi-rise building, conference hall, apt mains.
The arrogance of HN sometimes
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO a bad idea anyway - as a software dev, even a bad one, you can create more value for more people at the same time. As a plumber you're only fixing one thing for one person at a time so there's a hard limit on how valuable that is.
Tell that to literally any hi-rise building, conference hall, apt mains. The arrogance of HN sometimes
Never ascribe to arrogance that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#14I appreciate the author making the effort to write up an article to help people find their career paths, it's more than I've done, but their article needs some revisions since some things are wrong.
The welcome splash graphic shows data science having one of the lowest people skill requirements? What?
Yeah I get it's still a hazily defined field, but literally every attempted definition I've seen includes greater business/domain knowledge than the average programmer, which usually implies working and communicating with different business stakeholders. And DS requires a lot of communication for getting buy in for the new models.
They also should be fairly independent since they have to do a lot of exploring of the data and coming up with ways to get useful, actionable insight out of it, often creating a predictive model.
It's going to be hard to take the rest of the article seriously with things like that in the splash graphic.
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Value". I mean yes you can if you are antirez but lets stop glorifying software developers as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves. Plus fixing 30 kitchen sinks a month is a lot of value to me.
>as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves How do you explain software devs getting paid without providing any value?
C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time.
The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days.
I suggest checking out "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber :)
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#16Surprised that people management is not here
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
>as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves How do you explain software devs getting paid without providing any value?
C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time. The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days. I suggest checking…
And most plumbers are fixing clogs that a five year old with a rooter could fix thus providing no real value. See what I did there?
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Value". I mean yes you can if you are antirez but lets stop glorifying software developers as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves. Plus fixing 30 kitchen sinks a month is a lot of value to me.
>as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves How do you explain software devs getting paid without providing any value?
I wouldn’t put most devs in the category but the existence of “bullshit jobs” that provide little to no value isn’t controversial is it?
Edit: other reply beat me to it
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
>as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves How do you explain software devs getting paid without providing any value?
C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time. The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days. I suggest checking…
> it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days.
I mean isn't value based on what you can convince someone else to pay for the service/product. Are Mac's really valued at 10 grand or whatever, but rather simply what they've convinced someone to pay for that.
Also, isn't that the same for plumbers for example? Plumbers being paid around $150/hr (this is what is the going rate for a good plumber in Australia) are providing the world with $150/hr of value. It just means that they convinced the customer to pay them $150/hr for turning up to their house and taking a look at a leaky tap, one that could be fixed in about 5 mins.
Re: Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
>as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves How do you explain software devs getting paid without providing any value?
C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time. The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days. I suggest checking…
Sure, people don't always ship. Companies and investors pay to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. It doesn't all stick, but if they threw nothing, nothing would.
The individual may not provide 100k, but N developers probably provide (at least) 100Nk value. That or the market is very broken.
As an aside, you and the parent both say "most", which I would doubt but is difficult to prove either way.