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Comment by gte910h | Hacker News Reader

Marketing: You can analyze and check your data 100-1000x faster than your co-workers. Hell, you can make entire vendors obsolete. Additionally: Making graphs without opening Excel shaves days of work off your year.

Biology: You can catalog and simplify your workflow by breaking things up and correctly keeping them all organized while doing things the fast way.

Author: You create smart searches, web spiders, pattern recognition (to capture your repetitive sections) and you learn formatting. Additionally, the text editor skills are very nice for some types of writing.

Automotive/Racing: Calculating gear ratios? Analyzing race data? Optimizing pit stops? Not everyone is a formula one racer.

Small Businesses: Automated Scheduling of Clerks/floorpeople, inventory managment, loss detection.

Fashion: Modeling (no pun intended) cloth usage by shape cuts, number of seams required, etc.

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Also, from personal experience:

Teacher: create randomized, self-grading quizzes from a test bank of question templates; optimize the dickens out of your grading work flow; check for cheating on assignments

Interestingly there's a scandal running in Denmark right now where a big vendor has received around $10 million to create a system much like the one you're describing. The system was a year late, and now it doesn't work and constantly crashes due to overload. Embarrassing.

This is all great - if you're already a programmer and decide to pursue a different career, but still like programming.

Notice how weird that is? If you like programming, why are you doing something else? If you don't, why would you add programming to your duties as a race car driver? OK, if you really love both, do both.

Otherwise, you're just wasting time that you should be working on your actual job by piddling around in related programming projects. You're probably being mediocre at both instead of good at one.

> Notice how weird that is? If you like programming, why are you doing something else? If you don't, why would you add programming to your duties as a race car driver? OK, if you really love both, do both.

It's not weird to like more than one thing. It's also not weird to look at all of the areas you enjoy working in and make a combination of them work. This is what allows us to make a unique contribution.

>This is all great - if you're already a programmer and decide to pursue a different career, but still like programming.Notice how weird that is? If you like programming, why are you doing something else?

Because if you know even a little, it goes a long ways in other fields. And honestly, a huge number of programming jobs SUCK. I mean, it's a field specifically excepted from overtime laws!

>why would you add programming to your duties as a race car driver?

Because you want to race better? And it's not the driver who I know who does this (it's actually motorcycle racing), but instead some of the pit crew who does. Even hooked up a neato GPS thing for the racer.

>Otherwise, you're just wasting time that you should be working on your actual job by piddling around in related programming projects

Spoken like someone who's never worked outside of software development. If your job is "select the 10 best properties to turn over", you job could very well include "write software to help do that". If your job is "Make sure this data is sane", you can most likely write some software to help the process along, decrease repetition, and otherwise make you look awesome.

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