About 4 years ago, I left my career in the actuarial field with no clear alternative in mind. My primary reason for exiting was a concern with being trapped in the insurance industry for the rest of my career. I may have been foolish to leave a stable field that is widely considered one of the most comfortable jobs in the world, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain in that sector until retirement.
During my first undergraduate degree at a STEM school, I heard almost no conversations about the industries that my peers wanted to work in. The prestige of the job they were after was the only important factor. I thought this was concerning then, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found this personal distancing that STEM workers do from their work interesting. We all have a set of values that inform our decision making, yet I rarely see this inform people in STEM’s job choices.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not as granular as I would like, but it does show that as programmers, we’ll have a bit of choice in the sector we end up in. The table below shows the distribution of the largest employers for programmers as of 2021.
There are obviously a lot of additional employers missing, but almost all of these data points encompass a variety of industries. As someone privileged enough to have a comfortable office career with some choice in where I work, I’ll always be drawing personal lines in the sand around certain industries (and ruining my opportunities at some prestigious companies). If you’re lucky enough to have the freedom of job mobility, I’d encourage you to always think about the material impact of your work on the world – good or bad!
