In Zed Shaw's new Python book, he writes:<p>"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."<p>How true is this, as far as you know? Have you had more success programming in non-programming-related fields? What relevant experiences do you have?
I've worked in enterprise software dev and testing, a big financial corp, on a small bioinformatic data export contract project, and now in a bioinformatics group in a pure research setting where the focus is on the science and not on programming except as a support to the science.<p>I strongly believe that deep tech skills with extensive domain specific knowledge is the most valuable combo in all those environments. If you can quickly soak up domain specific knowledge as even an average developer, you're going to be well respected and thought of. I'm not great at this part, but do well simply by having reasonable communication skills - it's flat out amazing how many tech folks fail based on bad people skills.<p>Honestly though, I think expectations are so low, so often that people are completely willing to put up with really low quality results if they can simply pay bottom dollar for coders. This ties in with organization culture in any of those environments - it will far and away be the dominant factor in your ability to be successful programming. If the culture is restrictive or narrow-minded, you'll struggle.<p>Maybe Zed is trying to drive home that there is lot of headcount floating around in tech companies with a job title that would lead you to think they were doing a bunch of development, but they amount to magic TPF report generators. The other option, and one that I love stumbling into, is that there are some tremendously smart people in those fields he mentions who have taught themselves to code to do cool hacking in the field. I find that as an "officially credentialed" CS type, many of these people have picked up a significant amount of what I spent more than a few years in formal education pursuing.
I used to work in bioinformatics and got paid less and worked with worse engineers on more tedious problems than when I worked at a pure tech company. I don't know if I was respected. It was one of the few jobs where the level of Asperger's syndrome increased as one went up the management chain. I don't think my boss, a PhD/MD, really ever remembered my name or what I was supposed to be working on, or that it registered that I was a human being. I'm not sure if he considered himself a human being. Mostly it sucked.<p>When I was very young I made the website for an alternative newspaper (like the Village Voice) and they thought I was a cool whiz kid. The kinda hot and MILFy single mom secretary always came onto me at the company drinking outings. Maybe that's what Zed means?