Re:Ask HN: Career path for developers
by rgrieselhuber on Monday April 20, 2009 @10:22AM
(#570721)
Totally agree.
The most intimidating thing to non-technical business people (not that you should aim for intimidating people, but sometimes it helps to have an edge in a competitive environment) are people close at the top of the "value-chain" and actually know how to build what they are selling.
Even better if you're the one with control over both what you're selling and how you sell it.
The bit about the PhD in microbiology caught my eye here--to people getting bored with "blub" programming: perhaps look into a field like bioinformatics, meteorology, and so on. You'd be working on difficult, "technical" things, but you'd be able to leverage your existing skills and simultaneously assist with the (inevitable?) computational aspects of that particular research.
So whatever you do, I'd recommend keeping your coding skills. You could do that by starting your own software training company for example, maybe start a site that teaches basic skills to people and couple it with live courses. That's my 2 cents, anyway.