I was attracted to software as a career choice mainly because I saw it as a metaindustry with a low barrier of entry. It almost seemed too good to be true.

METAINDUSTRIES

There are a few industries that are not their own industries in and of themselves, but instead more of an industry that sits on top of other industries. I call them metaindustries and software is one of those.

The main characterization of a metaindustry is that it’s not enough to understand your own industry to be effective, you must also understand the industry you’re working in.

If you’re a software developer, you need to understand some technical things that most boot camps can teach you in 6-12 weeks, but then the real work begins of choosing what industry you want to work in.

A software developer writes software, but that’s more a means to an end. The software should solve a problem. To solve that problem you need to understand the problem, which means you need to understand the context that problem sits in, which is normally an industry. Robinhood is an app. But it sits within the financial industry. It’s a tech solution for the financial industry and so Robinhood and its compatriots have been dubbed Fintech.

98Point6 is an app. But, it sits within the healthcare space. It’s a tech solution for the healthcare industry, so 98Point6 and its compatriots have been dubbed Healthtech. You get the idea.

What’s fun is that you can recurse on this and start writing software for the software industry? For example, AWS, Okta, etc. These are tech solutions for tech companies, so I think all of these companies should be classified as techtech, obviously.

OTHER METAINDUSTRIES

LAW

When you become a lawyer you don’t practice law in the abstract. You specialize, by necessity. You’re a family lawyer, or a divorce lawyer, or a prosecutor, etc. Laws and rules don’t exist in the abstract, they exist in the context of their industry.

DESIGN

Designers are, almost by definition, problem solvers. Every field values them differently, but a good designer needs to understand the field in order to solve whatever it is they are designing for. Hence, it’s difficult to be a good designer without understanding the problems of the field you’re in.