What does skill have to do with anything? Pure programming is an answer in search of questions. Programming helps solve problems, but without knowledge of other

What does skill have to do with anything? Pure programming is an answer in search of questions. Programming helps solve problems, but without knowledge of other fields, a programmer, no matter how good, has no idea what problems to attack. Programmers know a whole lot about... programming. Some people therefore write development tools, IDEs, text editors, compilers, operating systems, and databases. This seems to me a relatively small niche, though. Commercial development tools often live and die by free and open-source competition. Otherwise, without actual domain knowledge, a programmer becomes a tool for people who do possess this knowledge. Typical programming jobs suck because they boil down to pushing data from point A to point B, while transforming it in a way specified by someone else. For example, in the financial industry, a non-quant programmer is just a cog. Possibly a highly intelligent and competent cog, but still never the person who designed the underlying process. On the other hand, a quant with programming ability actually has a chance to do something original. Even traditional "computer sciencey" work is rarely just about programming. Computational biology, computational geometry, robotics — those are real fields, where programming helps solve problems.