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Curious to know what other profession you might be considering going into where you can use your programming skills as your secret weapon.

by gcheong 17y ago

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
Almost every profession, actually.
- starkfist 17y ago
  Like running a fast food restaurant? Or being a surgeon? Or a lawyer?
  - inerte 17y ago
    Definitively being a lawyer. Last week ago I hired a lawyer to look for some documentation for a house I was planning to buy, and about its owner. He showed me I think more than 20 prints of web apps that he had visited, and on each one he sometimes typed his login, sometimes searched for a number, other times the name of the person, other with his state of residence. He could have reduced his typing to just one. Also, if you don't believe this particular anecdote, I have dozens more. I've built web apps for law offices during 4 years. And when I left the company the TODO list for what I was working on was still huge. Absurdly huge. Software is never done. Programming manages information and reduces repetitive computer tasks, and lots of professionals have this problem. Now, should the owner of a fast food restaurant learn to code? Maybe not. Should he hire someone that knows how to code? Maybe not. Should he buy somekind of software to manage his operations? For sure. But it's the same necessity: There's a problem, you can either solve it yourself or pay someone else to do it. And the problem is managing information and time.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
zedshaw 17y ago
Porn?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- nailer 17y ago
  I can attest that programmers in porn can do incredibly well - Red Hat has a customer who purchased about 30K of Linux architecture training just to keep his brain active while he sat on the beach and occasionally reconfigured a server.
jrockway 17y ago
Finance, though it's obviously not a secret weapon anymore.
dagw 17y ago
I'm having a hard time thinking of a profession (outside of menial physical labour) where you couldn't use programming skills to either make your job easier or to do it better.

Curious to know what other profession you might be considering going into where you can use your programming skills as your secret weapon.

by gcheong 17y ago

Curious to know what other profession you might be considering going into where you can use your programming skills as your secret weapon.

aaronblohowiak 17y ago

Almost every profession, actually.

starkfist 17y ago
Like running a fast food restaurant? Or being a surgeon? Or a lawyer?
- inerte 17y ago
  Definitively being a lawyer. Last week ago I hired a lawyer to look for some documentation for a house I was planning to buy, and about its owner. He showed me I think more than 20 prints of web apps that he had visited, and on each one he sometimes typed his login, sometimes searched for a number, other times the name of the person, other with his state of residence. He could have reduced his typing to just one. Also, if you don't believe this particular anecdote, I have dozens more. I've built web apps for law offices during 4 years. And when I left the company the TODO list for what I was working on was still huge. Absurdly huge. Software is never done. Programming manages information and reduces repetitive computer tasks, and lots of professionals have this problem. Now, should the owner of a fast food restaurant learn to code? Maybe not. Should he hire someone that knows how to code? Maybe not. Should he buy somekind of software to manage his operations? For sure. But it's the same necessity: There's a problem, you can either solve it yourself or pay someone else to do it. And the problem is managing information and time.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

zedshaw 17y ago

Porn?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
nailer 17y ago
I can attest that programmers in porn can do incredibly well - Red Hat has a customer who purchased about 30K of Linux architecture training just to keep his brain active while he sat on the beach and occasionally reconfigured a server.

jrockway 17y ago

Finance, though it's obviously not a secret weapon anymore.

dagw 17y ago

I'm having a hard time thinking of a profession (outside of menial physical labour) where you couldn't use programming skills to either make your job easier or to do it better.