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by tekla 1037 days ago
I wonder how HN would respond if I asked "heya HN, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding"

This is effectively what the OP is asking.

2 comments

The most interesting thing about programmers is our unshakeable confidence that we could easily do any else's job. Where does that even come from? Coding is not even the hardest job I've done.
Continually hopping between varying levels of abstraction and different problem domains. Programming instills one with a decent universal ontological model for understanding things in general.

And honestly, I haven't met many things that I can't do when I put my mind to it. The real difficulty is doing them quickly.

My pet theory is that programmers are exposed to many business areas during their career, either directly or hearing it from other programmers. This desacralizes these jobs, and since we spend most of our days working though complexity (requirements, bugs, ...), you end up with "what's so hard about X?" statements.
this tendency is even worse for us physicists...
I like this thought exercise, but I also think the analogy would be more accurate if we asked "heya weldingnews.com, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding".

The answers would be bad I guess, which I believe is your point :)