The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Steve, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer

The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Steve, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Steve's parents as well as his uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time he was 18 years old Steve had a dozen years of programming experience under his belt On one occasion he was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Steve disapproved of. So, one weekend, Steve entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because he had humiliated the collaborators. (One thing to note about Steve is that he was on the spectrum -- as smart as they come, but not good at reading social and political situations.) Steve was not out of a job for long, however -- he was fired in the morning and by that afternoon he had accepted a job with a proprietary trading desk on Wall Street (he had a connection). His salary at least doubled. A year after that incident Steve called me up and asked me to come down and join him at the prop trading desk, so I did. We had a good ride until the 2008 financial crisis and then our entire division (several prop trading desks) was fired on Jan 2nd, 2009. It was difficult to get a job on Wall Street in early 2009 because everyone was laying people off and going belly up. But Steve immediately landed a $400,000/year job with an options trading house. When we were catching up over coffee a few months later he mentioned to me that one of his projects was designing a trading system that needed to solve 500,000 differential equations per second. I just wished him luck and thanked God that I had moved into coaching the LSAT instead. Unfortunately, Steve only lasted about 18 months at the options trading house -- he had a disagreement with another engineer about the best way to implement parallel processing for a certain situation and Steve was not one to give an inch when he thought he was right. So he got fired. The conclusion that Steve drew from this was that he never again wanted to work with someone who did not have a Ph.D., so he moved to a division of NASA that was doing research on how to model the melting of glaciers, and which is apparently a space that is full of people with Ph.Ds. It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, so Steve ended up doing heavy mathematical programming in Fortran. As far as I know, this is what he is still working on. Of course, Steve transitioned a couple of years ago and he (she?) now goes by Jessica.