Great post, thanks for writing this up. I'm relatively new to the industry and have already been feeling annoyance/fatigue at the IT/agile "culture" (experienced at a failing startup and now at a large corporation) My fiancé and I are hoping to move out of the city before long, and I hope to find something as interesting and unique as what you're doing. Feeling inspired and hopeful that I can find a job that uses programming/technology but isn't a "tech job."
I got my startup failure story out of the way in 2000, so I am lucky there. But yes, Agile has some fatigue for some who are tired of the faddishness. Some people find it invigorating, and more power to them.
My guess is that tons of these kinds of jobs are out there because the real world still exists and the people in it are often using computers, but perhaps not as "centrally" to their jobs. However, people like you and I can provide options to them that they did not have before, and sometimes may not have even envisioned. Just as a case in point, this new place was setting up some machines and had a few tedious configuration problems, so I used batch files and a few more things to save them time and add reproducible results. They were shocked but this was stuff for me where I had to dust off things I had forgotten a decade prior.
In my previous job, I found areas of satisfaction as I noticed above, and they were all tied to people (not users), to physical objects (rather than instatiations of some class), and so on. I noticed how much churn there was, how often things would have to be redone not because anything realistic demanded it, but because of style, or some kind of platform migration, or something else End-of-Lifed, and so on. Indeed, constant platform migration made me realize that nomads are not known for their lasting works of architecture.
Can I ask one more question: how did you make the move? And did you have a quantitative education? I know everyone's path is different, but I'm curious how you found your current role once you decided to get out of IT proper.
My education, as such, was pretty hit or miss. I got a BSc in the hard sciences, but had enough electives open due to other circumstances that I went a little wild, did more comp sci and math than were strictly required, tried some science classes unrelated to my degree for giggles.
I was part of that big "brain drain" where someone says, "Hey, you are good with computers, right?" and off I went. I had figured out that the sciences would be long and without a lot of payoff, so I did not look back too hard.
I suppose I got a reputation as someone who gets a far-off look when an interesting problem is described and was asked to apply to my current job because of it, despite it being a different sector and problem set.
