[bornhuetter]

I am an actuary, and next week is hopefully my last in the industry; I am going off to do an MBA and then hopefully become a semi-technical founder. I got here for exactly the reason you said, I'm good at maths and it pays well. I'm leaving because it's no fun. I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off sticking to my original plan and becoming a software engineer.

[beachstartup]

> I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off sticking to my original plan and becoming a software engineer.

depends on the job. a software engineer could be stuck writing business forms.

conversely, you could be Nate Silver, the world's most famous and exciting actuary. in this case meaning "well paid guy who does stats and math".

[bornhuetter]

I don't think Nate Silver is an actuary, he's a statistician - completely different jobs.

When I went to university (late 90's), the web was still one big geo-cities, there was no such thing as smartphones. I lived in Australia, and unless you were extremely talented you would probably end up working a fairly low paid job doing fairly boring work. The world seems to be a far more exciting and potentially lucrative place for software engineers now.