I started my career as a GIS analyst and was steeped in the "geospatial industry" for a few years. As I grew my career into software development, I found an ent

I started my career as a GIS analyst and was steeped in the "geospatial industry" for a few years. As I grew my career into software development, I found an entire world of innovative practices and technologies that had been largely hidden from view. Linux, Databases, HTTP, legit programming languages, software best practices... these things are largely absent from the GIS curriculum. In their place are bespoke, proprietary systems that solve the Geographic part well but are painfully isolated from the Information Systems that the rest of the world are working on. My biggest realizations came using tools like PostGIS, GeoPandas, Rasterio, and Numpy where geography is just another data type (albeit with some specialized functions to work with them) and well integrated with the rest of the software ecosystem. You can see it reflected in the salaries - A "GIS Programmer" will often make a fraction of what a "Software Engineer" makes. There's a reason for that - for most use cases, geospatial isn't unique enough to warrant a walled garden of technology.