Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/alternative-career-paths/

by mooreds • 6 years ago

55 25 6 years ago

yarrick• 6 years ago

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

tersers• 6 years ago

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.

marcinzm3• 6 years ago

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.

pansa2• 6 years ago

Yeah, half of these careers are just “software developer with a different job title”.

twblalock• 6 years ago

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.

xchaotic• 6 years ago

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.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

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.

icedistilled• 6 years ago

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.

chetan_v• 6 years ago

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.

mratsim• 6 years ago

Similarly Teacher and Trainer should have the most people skills requirement and be all the way to the right.

Security Analyst and Business Analyst have a high people skills requirement as well, you spend your time hovering and translating 2 domains:

- Security or Business

- Developers

And often sales, marketing, legal as well.

karlhughes• 6 years ago

That's a fair critique, although I didn't mean to imply that any of these roles take 0 people skills - only that some involve more time creating things solo vs. interacting with a team.

I also think there's a lot of variation in these roles, so my experience with them is probably just limited.

krallja• 6 years ago

Surprised that people management is not here

RickJWagner• 6 years ago

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.

Alternative Career Paths That Software Developers Can Grow Into

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