I'm nominally a software engineer, but what I really do is form proper questions. Coding is just how the answers to those questions are written down, and somet

I'm nominally a software engineer, but what I really do is form proper questions. Coding is just how the answers to those questions are written down, and sometimes how they are answered. But my cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the things I work on. If you're doing software and said software is not strategic and it's not tactical, then it's nothing but cost and you're a target. And to be fair, programming as a career got oversold between 1990 and 2000. At least my experience in the 1980s was that instructors were careful to signal the downside of it as an activity. Adam Curtis documentaries are pretty careful to express skepticism about technocratic Utopianism and I don't think he's wrong. I lacked the resources ( and probably the talent, frankly ) to obtain a PhD in applied mathematics but I knew that's what I should have striven for. It's still true, probably.