It's always fun to imagine what our lives would be like if we had made different choices. So, if you weren't a coder or a developer, what would you be instead? A chef, a musician, a veterinarian? Are there opportunities to incorporate your alternate passions into coding career?
Let's hear from you all! Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Oldest comments (42)
Would probably be an SFX makeup artist.
Drone farmer, drones for crop monitoring, and implementing automated systems for watering and fertilizing the land!
snowboard instructor!
Own a garden centre.
Run a charity for disabled children.
Lego master builder!
Engineer (bridges and stuff)
In a realistic scenario, dunno, I might just be screwed to be honest.
But in a fantasy world where things just work out, I sure would enjoy mixing cocktails and making coffee/tea for a living.
In fact, if I ever won the lottery, opening a cafe and operating at a loss would probably be my way of blowing through the money 😅
Depending on the lottery you could probably just give away drinks and still not blow through the money.
When you're a programmer at heart, all career paths eventually lead to code. I've had multiple non-developer jobs over the years where I ended up writing tools to get the work more efficiently.
I'm actually doing this right now. Freelancing just wasn't cutting it to pay the bills so I had to take a non-technical job recently and the daily process needs some serious fine tuning. We're using a clunky, outdated mobile app where I tediously have to scroll and scroll and scroll past useless options to find the same few checkboxes for every unit I handle. So I'm working on a revamped app in my spare time that I'm gonna pitch to the boss when it's a little farther along.
This is one of those 50 times per day tasks that could have multiple minutes shaved off each iteration, so definitely worth the effort. Not every task necessarily needs optimizing though. Always a good idea to consult the "Is It Worth The Time" chart from xkcd before getting into a project like that.
Towards the end of my training on Symfony 4.8 and Java 8, I skipped class because I was tired of sitting with my ass on the chair for 8 hours straight in front of a screen. I told myself that this was not a life.
I am a pastry baker.
I have a lot more satisfaction doing manual work, feeling a sense of accomplishment and feeling good tiredness at the end of the day, even with a lower salary, within a close-knit team and with a great atmosphere. I work in an association that serves breakfast and desserts (in addition to the restaurant and banquets) for the homeless.
I still code at home, but there's still an energy at work that you can't find behind a desk.
I'd likely go for automotive stuff like detailing, or maybe web development if I didn't take the IoT route.
Owner/shopkeeper at a stationer's shop.
Pornostar
Lets do it !!!!
I'd play football
I was a phone technician before I learned to code. So phone technician it is or Carpentry.
I think i would be a mechanich!!! I love cars (real cars.... with petrol in the engine!!!), in my (very little) free time I attend to my car like a baby!
Definetly my original training: Music, teach and playing.
Although I love being a developer, it was always my second passion and I'm glad I could make a career of it!
My alternative was studying psychology. I did not intend to become a therapist, but
especially back in school I liked trying to analyze people and predicting their behaviour. When my friend started studying psychology I learnt that it is a really wide field with a lots of statistic. So I think if I had chosen psychology I nevertheless would have ended up with a "kind of programming" job putting data in a statistic software, writing scripts and analyzing that stuff :D