[marc_abonce]

> When coming across modern writers I will often check their biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".

I agree with the idea but I was very surprised by the last part of your comment because, in my experience, software engineering fits perfectly into the type of job that you call "disconnected" and "abstract" rather than anything "grounded in actual life".

[Retric]

I always found software to be extremely concrete activity. All that stuff going on in your head still needs to be typed or nothing changes. A failing memory model on your development machine is a really unpleasant wake up call that all this stuff is operating in the real world.

You can try to abstract as much as you want, but you can’t hand wave the speed of light or even just the messy world of user problems / 3rd party software issues.