I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder.
In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.
In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.
I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search )
Frankly, it's amazing. There's a sandbox where you can play with it here: http://viewer.opencalais.com/ Copy and past a couple paragraphs of text into the text box, and you can see some of what the api can do.
It was the .com bust along with a few other things. The market was so over-saturated with hacks in for a quick buck that when it popped it took a while to shake out who was who. This ran a lot of good developers out of the market never to return. The outsourcing craze right afterward did nothing to help the situation and just reinforced that the remaining few jobs where going to be further and further constrained. Which is what happened for a while. The schools and their CS programs pretty much became ghost town overnight.
I know, I had went back to finish my degree after 10 years in the industry around that time. I remember what was a full class became me an 2 other guys. I remember saying to one of them. Times are going to get good again in about 5 years.
Not surprisingly, it was basically a one-way street.
(It also reminds me of http://xkcd.com/435/ )
Addendum: For the difference between hard and soft science, see http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt... - the hard sciences are the ones based on the "strong inference" defined there