I am a bioengineer by degree, software developer by profession. Most valuable skill that I use in the day-to-day is thinking like a programmer, and understandin

I am a bioengineer by degree, software developer by profession. Most valuable skill that I use in the day-to-day is thinking like a programmer, and understanding how to make sense of data in an intelligent way. But ultimately, this is all about solving problems - programming is simply a tool towards this end. Go up to a carpenter (and I mean a well-trained carpenter, the kind who carries more than just the PHP hammer [0]) and ask him which carpentry technique to use, and he'll tell you the right answer in a flash. But ask him whether carpentry is even the right approach for a given problem, and I wish you good luck. Programming skills are important, but a deep knowledge of the problem domain is sometimes far more critical to being able to actually solve the problem. [0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity...