Leveraging Development Skills in Other Fields?

It Can't Be All Bad asks: "I've been working as a programmer for a few years now, and I really love the work. I'm trying to think ahead of possible ways to leverage my skills into more specific areas where programmers are welcome and can find work. Areas like bio and chemical informatics appear very interesting ,but for the most part they seem to be for chem/bio majors with masters degrees. My biggest problem is that I'm self taught with only about a years worth of college experience. At this point in my life (with a family, kids, and bills), going back to school just isn't an option anymore. I wanted to know if anyone has had any success utilizing their development skills in specific fields that don't require masters degrees, and what areas I could be overlooking. Like most people here, I just want to be a part of exciting projects with some sort of purpose behind them."

Comments

You can apply programming skills to lots of things

[menace3society]

but do you really want to? The perspective on problem-solving gained through computer programming is useful for virtually any task repeated more than a couple of times. I worked in an industrial-strength kitchen popping things in and out of the oven, and knowledge of things like modularity, latency, pipelining, and resource locking made me an incredibly efficient baker. Using the idea of symmetric multi-processing made me faster when working as a cashier because I used both hands to wave things past the bar code scanner. Knowing how sorting algorithms made me really good at a desk job moving papers around based on index numbers.

Re:Reach out and educate someone.

[anagama]

Don't forget divorce. There's lots of options.