
Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into - mooreds
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/alternative-career-paths/
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tersers
I'm disappointed that the list focusses entirely on technical roles and
ignores careers completely opposite to software development. I think a
programmer would make a good mechanic, electrician, or plumber from the
debugging skills alone.

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twblalock
Good luck trying to leverage software engineering experience to move into the
trades like plumbing or mechanic work. You'll probably be laughed at, and then
you'll start at the entry level just like everyone else.

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xchaotic
IMO a bad idea anyway - as a software dev, even a bad one, you can create more
value for more people at the same time. As a plumber you're only fixing one
thing for one person at a time so there's a hard limit on how valuable that
is.

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NikolaeVarius
Tell that to literally any hi-rise building, conference hall, apt mains.

The arrogance of HN sometimes

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ironmagma
Never ascribe to arrogance that which can be adequately explained by
ignorance.

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Judgmentality
But believing you are better than someone else due to ignorance is pretty much
the definition of arrogance.

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ironmagma
Original statement was about the capabilities of the _roles_ of software
developers vs. plumbers, not the virtue of a person in the first role versus
the second.

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icedistilled
I appreciate the author making the effort to write up an article to help
people find their career paths, it's more than I've done, but their article
needs some revisions since some things are wrong.

The welcome splash graphic shows data science having one of the lowest people
skill requirements? What?

Yeah I get it's still a hazily defined field, but literally every attempted
definition I've seen includes greater business/domain knowledge than the
average programmer, which usually implies working and communicating with
different business stakeholders. And DS requires a lot of communication for
getting buy in for the new models.

They also should be fairly independent since they have to do a lot of
exploring of the data and coming up with ways to get useful, actionable
insight out of it, often creating a predictive model.

It's going to be hard to take the rest of the article seriously with things
like that in the splash graphic.

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chetan_v
Yeah it seemed kind of strange to me that Data Science and R&D are both not
considered highly independent, I guess on some teams there is a more
collaborative atmosphere but most of the data science work I have done seemed
pretty independent. The people skills I agree with also, can't see how any
data scientist could get by without strong people skills to communicate their
results with leaders and to collaborate with subject matter experts.

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yarrick
SRE work as “highly reactive”? Then you are not doing it right.

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RickJWagner
I've always liked Scott Adam's career path (includes 'programmer', 'product
manager' and of course creator of Dilbert.

I've always thought Gary Larson would have made a good programmer, too.

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krallja
Surprised that people management is not here

