I was looking at developers recently and a thought occurred to me, I was evaluating the behavioural characteristics of developers that would help them excel in totally different fields that hire for attitude and train for skill. The first on my list would definitely be the secret service; I looked up the requirements for that line of work and a lot of it hinged on being very observant, self-reliant, humble, creative, intelligent, able to blend in and mix with people, among other traits.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ARE VERY OBSERVANT
I can scarcely imagine a professional more observant than a software engineer and this is because we can write thousands of lines of code that won't work because of a missing ";", we spend hours if not days debugging applications and it hones attention to detail. If each software engineer were to tout their horns about what they build, the average netizens would be surprised. While it's ok for other professionals to publicly celebrate some milestone, software engineers have to be more careful and learn to keep these secrets.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ARE VERY DISCRETE
Imagine being at a public event and hearing someone brag in detail about how he wrote the code for a certain feature that your bank uses to keep your money safe, even if you don't understand the details, you'd have good cause to worry about your account safety. Jobs in the military, proofreading/editorial services, and even specialized fields that require immense training are typically fields where software engineers will have a walk in the park and it's not because software engineers are super smart.
TENACITY IS EVERYTHING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
The most valuable tool of software engineers is simply their tenacity, software engineers can spend days, weeks and even months working on fixing issues without giving up. Software engineering requires a special class of tenacity and that's simply it. This isn't to say that software engineers are the best thing to happen to mankind since sliced bread 😂, it's however to emphasize the fact that software engineers aren't misfits who can't work anywhere else (as the media portrays at times), we're just average people who spend time with code.
FINALLY
We've seen several people (🤧 like me) transition into the field of software engineering without a computer science degree, and there are others who have left the field of software engineering for other career paths in HR and the likes. This post is aimed at establishing two things; firstly there is no special intelligence requirement to become a software engineer, all you need is discipline, lastly, software engineers can fit in well in other disciplines because software engineers are also professionals.