[patio11]

For me the original plan was bilingual (English/Japanese) plus engineering but I ended up getting more career mileage out of being able to program rings around most SaaS companies' marketing teams. (A high bar that is not.)

You can pick many, many things here, though. Combining programming (any stack which lets you ship things) plus any other white collar profession works well, too. Try embedding in anybody's workday and just sit on your hands and watch the insanity as they do any data-processing work, for example. It's insane how much of day-to-day accounting work exists because of the lack of 50 lines of Ruby.

[robinhoode]

In my experience I've found that you can automate a lot of white collar work if the rest of the business will become organized enough to make that happen. If they aren't collecting or ingesting the right data already, then the hard part is changing their behavior, not writing the code.

[lsniddy]

could you elaborate on what you do when "programming rings around most SaaS companies' marketing teams" ? Thanks!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

His blog does a really good job of explaining this. And you'll probably learn a lot of other stuff. It's worth getting sucked into kalzumeus :-)