I've held programming jobs in: Water Treatment Process Control, Workflow Management, Clinical Trials Management, Electrical Power Monitoring and Simulation, and

I've held programming jobs in: Water Treatment Process Control, Workflow Management, Clinical Trials Management, Electrical Power Monitoring and Simulation, and Medical Imaging. In each case my natural curiosity led me to learn as much as I could about the field. I always enjoyed talking to the domain experts at each company and asking them as many questions as they could handle. There are usually one or two people who relish answering these questions and I especially like the ones who talk fast, mock astonishment at my ignorance, and proceed to try to fix it. In water treatment, I learned about oxic/anoxic bacteria and how they're grown and recycled in the process to treat waste, how to write chemical metering logic in a PLC because I was the only one left on-site to do it, how motors are controlled with variable frequency drives, how proportional-integral-derivatives are used to prevent oscillation in feedback based controls. In clinical trials management, I learned how double-blind studies are made, the process of randomization and dispensing drugs, medical coding and the life cycle of the trial. In power systems simulation, I learned about three-phase power transmission, resistive and capacitive loads, active and reactive power, the challenges of hooking up a lot of solar panels our existing grids, how data centers are build and cooled and powered, microgrids, power meters, intelligent breakers and more. I feel privileged that my skills at software development have exposed me to a variety of fields and that I know how several important processes in our word work. And I got to take home a nice salary while gaining that exposure. I do lament that, unless I pick a field and stick with it, I'll never get to work on the difficult programming problems that require a decade or more of experience and knowledge.