My first post on HN, but I wanted to share my experience. While in college for my CS degree I worked part time in the automotive industry (first as an intern, later as "student employee"), most of the time implementing lean manufacturing methods/processes. It is amazing how many problems are laying around in big manufacturing companies, you just have to walk around with open eyes. And most of them are easily solvable if you think in a structured manner (a thing mathematician, programmers, physic's, etc. tend to do). After college (2008) financial crisis struck and I was happy to get a job in a software company, since that was what I studied for and I wanted to see something else. But two years later I got an offer back in the automotive industry and I took it.

The big difference was that in the software company I was working to meet the specs of the client/boss. Not much creativity asked for, since it only had to be as good as necessary. Today I work in logistics and at least in my case it is so much easier to excel here, since they have huge amounts of data flowing around but hardly anybody making sense of it.

I'm not a full time programmer anymore, back to the lean production thing now, but I do get to program still. The thing is that now I can "choose" the problems I want to work on and more important nobody tells me how I have to solve them. Also the feedback you get is much more immediate (production may depend on the data) and honest/direct (since they look you into the eyes while telling you their critic). And it is easy to amaze people when all they are used to is SAP and MS Excel/PowerPoint.

Finally I have to admit that I got lucky with my bosses, they let me do and support me.