I am an example of this trend, having dropped out of a physics PhD program to pursue programming, and feeling great about the decision. There are two points which are not made by the author and which I think deserve to be mentioned:
1.) Scientific research is hard. It is very frustrating to spend all day working on something you can't be sure is going to even work. On the other hand, programming is easy, it's mostly monkey work. Sure there are places where you have to be clever and think things out carefully, but at the end of the day, when you write code it just feels like you have so much more to show than when you do research.
2.) In research, you need to get grant money to do anything, because research is expensive. So much time is then spent writing grant proposals, and even when you get money you still can't do everything you want because it's just too expensive and/or time consuming. I'm not talking about LHC money here, but just the standard money for a professor running a lab in a university.
In programming, you can work on (I'd estimate) 95+% of problems with nothing more than your computer and some old fashioned hard work. There are so many good, free to use open source libraries out there, making it pretty easy to jump into whatever field is interesting to you. Best of all, when you finish a project, there is no need to spend weeks writing a paper about it or any of the nonsense associated with that, you can just publish your code.
Comments
I am an example of this trend, having dropped out of a physics PhD program to pursue programming, and feeling great about the decision. There are two points which are not made by the author and which I think deserve to be mentioned:
1.) Scientific research is hard. It is very frustrating to spend all day working on something you can't be sure is going to even work. On the other hand, programming is easy, it's mostly monkey work. Sure there are places where you have to be clever and think things out carefully, but at the end of the day, when you write code it just feels like you have so much more to show than when you do research.
2.) In research, you need to get grant money to do anything, because research is expensive. So much time is then spent writing grant proposals, and even when you get money you still can't do everything you want because it's just too expensive and/or time consuming. I'm not talking about LHC money here, but just the standard money for a professor running a lab in a university.
In programming, you can work on (I'd estimate) 95+% of problems with nothing more than your computer and some old fashioned hard work. There are so many good, free to use open source libraries out there, making it pretty easy to jump into whatever field is interesting to you. Best of all, when you finish a project, there is no need to spend weeks writing a paper about it or any of the nonsense associated with that, you can just publish your code.