

Ask HN: Most interesting career change after programming - the_cat_kittles

i&#x27;m sure you can guess what i&#x27;ve been thinking about, but i&#x27;m wondering if anyone has any interesting stories or articles about people who went in to unexpected fields after quitting programming- like someone who became a train conductor, or an artist, or an architect etc.
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pjungwir
Well I only tried this out then came back to programming after a few years,
but I started a Ph.D. program for a Classical Studies degree (Greek & Latin).
I finished the Masters but figured out it wasn't for me and skipped the
dissertation. Nevertheless it seems to really impress people. I like to say
that if you can read Greek you can certainly read Perl or C++. :-)

There are tons of opportunities to apply tech to ancient languages. The
problem is there isn't much money in it. I'd love to see a well-executed
online critical edition with hyperlinks and diffs for comparing manuscripts. I
wrote a script once to read in dactylic hexameter and automatically scan it. A
tool to export L'Annee Philologique entries as bibtex would be awesome, but
their native format is a mess, and you'd have to detect bibliography words
like "and", "ed.", etc. in French, German, Spanish, and others.

When I was at Penn I kept hearing stories about how one of the sons of Hewlitt
or Packard (I forget which) had a lot of classics-and-programming projects,
but I don't know any specifics.

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trcollinson
FYI I believe you are thinking of Dr. David Woodley Packard, the son of Dave
Packard, who was a professor of Greek and Latin studies among other things.
Super interesting guy! He did a lot of studies into classics and language and
used much of his families technical background to make strides in it.

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lsmod
Saw this[0] a few weeks ago on HN[1]

[0] [http://hello-world.io/death-of-a-programmer-life-of-a-
farmer...](http://hello-world.io/death-of-a-programmer-life-of-a-farmer/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492110)

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zeeed
I know about a guy who, after finishing and shipping the nightmare-project-of-
his-lifetime went and became a car salesman.

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gesman
My wife opened high-end dog collars online store after helping our standard
poodles to look pretty :)

