Ask HN: I love coding but hate software engineering. What's next?
I like computers. I love coding. But I hate working as a software engineer. I dislike having to deal with big codebases, legacy undocumented code, pricky code reviewers, slow bloated IDEs/frameworks and things like that. I've tried (for years) but now I must admit I'm done.
I want to shift my career into some area where my coding skills would be appreciated as a tool to enhance my work, but not as the goal of my everyday work.
What are my options? I've heard Economists and Biologists are using coding to crunch data, but that's it. Is there any other option?
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I would suggest not working at places where there is a critical mass of CS types. Find an engineering company where the product isn't software or worse adware.
The 'pricky code reviewers' could be addressed by having an honest conversation with your colleague(s).
Plus, no shade intended as I do scientific / academic code professionally, but for historical reasons a lot of scientific code has one goal in mind; be as effing fast as possible, no matter the cost. Often times projects like WRF or BLAST achieve this end to an impressive extent, but there is a reason the most readable code is not always the fastest.
The latency / throughput budget of a project can be divvied up in a lot of different ways. In your mobile app it's likely best to avoid optimization for clarity; so you might overspend in the name of maintenance or easy of extension. That said, if this was the 80s and you were attempting to sequence genes, you are probably thinking "clarity be damned we'll just rewrite it later when computers get fast."
That is what a lot of scientific code looks like. It is written just as the idea is possible, probably a little before it is possible. As a result there are esoteric optimizations everywhere and questionable architectural choices as far as the eye can see, all in the name of "making it actually happen."