I had a CS degree but was working outside the field in pharmaceuticals. I was having the problem myself and wrote a crazy Excel spreadsheet with tens of thousands of lines of poorly written copy pasted code to do it. I knew that there would be a market for it so I contacted an old classmate of mine who rewrote it much better as a web service.
That is why I think CS and software engineering should be part of every college degree, so that people can see the opportunity for software where it exists. I wasn’t good enough to be a programmer but I had enough knowledge to see an opportunity whereas most people thought “hm, this is just how this is done.”
> Here's an exercise you can do: do you understand what a life insurance agent does all day every day? Make it your mission for a week to do so, well enough to explain it to a close friend who has no access to your sources. All you have to do to learn this is read and make conversations happen. (People are happy to talk to you!)
I really need to take that seriously, and talk to people in a lot of different industries.
