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Ask HN: Most interesting career change after programming

8 points by the_cat_kittles ↗ HN
i'm sure you can guess what i've been thinking about, but i'm wondering if anyone has any interesting stories or articles about people who went in to unexpected fields after quitting programming- like someone who became a train conductor, or an artist, or an architect etc.

6 comments

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gesman
My wife opened high-end dog collars online store after helping our standard poodles to look pretty :)
pjungwir
Well I only tried this out then came back to programming after a few years, but I started a Ph.D. program for a Classical Studies degree (Greek & Latin). I finished the Masters but figured out it wasn't for me and skipped the dissertation. Nevertheless it seems to really impress people. I like to say that if you can read Greek you can certainly read Perl or C++. :-)

There are tons of opportunities to apply tech to ancient languages. The problem is there isn't much money in it. I'd love to see a well-executed online critical edition with hyperlinks and diffs for comparing manuscripts. I wrote a script once to read in dactylic hexameter and automatically scan it. A tool to export L'Annee Philologique entries as bibtex would be awesome, but their native format is a mess, and you'd have to detect bibliography words like "and", "ed.", etc. in French, German, Spanish, and others.

When I was at Penn I kept hearing stories about how one of the sons of Hewlitt or Packard (I forget which) had a lot of classics-and-programming projects, but I don't know any specifics.

trcollinson
FYI I believe you are thinking of Dr. David Woodley Packard, the son of Dave Packard, who was a professor of Greek and Latin studies among other things. Super interesting guy! He did a lot of studies into classics and language and used much of his families technical background to make strides in it.
ChristianGeek
I went from programming to being Editor-in-Chief of two large national magazines (not at the same time) to writing several technical books to being Creative Director of a local advertising agency to programming again. Fun ride!
zeeed
I know about a guy who, after finishing and shipping the nightmare-project-of-his-lifetime went and became a car salesman.