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.
It seems to focus on roles where your former software engineering experience is useful and your years of experience translate to starting at a non-junior role. There's innumerable jobs where problem solving is useful however starting a career over from scratch (including pay wise) is very painful.
Plus, practically speaking, the article is already 20+ jobs long, adding the dozens of other careers that require logic (including doctors, lawyers, carpenters, etc.) would make the article so long as to be pointless.
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.
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.
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.
"Value". I mean yes you can if you are antirez but lets stop glorifying software developers as most of them dont provide any value to anyone except themselves. Plus fixing 30 kitchen sinks a month is a lot of value to me.
C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time.
The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days.
I suggest checking out "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber :)
Sure, people don't always ship. Companies and investors pay to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. It doesn't all stick, but if they threw nothing, nothing would.
The individual may not provide 100k, but N developers probably provide (at least) 100Nk value. That or the market is very broken.
As an aside, you and the parent both say "most", which I would doubt but is difficult to prove either way.
> it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days.
I mean isn't value based on what you can convince someone else to pay for the service/product. Are Mac's really valued at 10 grand or whatever, but rather simply what they've convinced someone to pay for that.
Also, isn't that the same for plumbers for example? Plumbers being paid around $150/hr (this is what is the going rate for a good plumber in Australia) are providing the world with $150/hr of value. It just means that they convinced the customer to pay them $150/hr for turning up to their house and taking a look at a leaky tap, one that could be fixed in about 5 mins.
That applies to plumbers as well. Which means we either come up with a comprehensive philosophy on what constitutes "value" or we go with the capitalistic approach of "what someone is willing to pay."
In high school they gave me a series of tests that concluded I was in the highest 1% of the population for linguistic comprehension and the lowest 3% of the population for spatial comprehension; I believe I have improved the second metric since then but I still doubt I would make a good mechanic, electrician, or plumber.
A side note, people are often surprised by the bugs I find.
