The mind, as my mentor observed, is polymorphic (and he wrote that in 1953, not after Java made it fashionable. But then, he was a polymath (more colloquially known as a ‘renaissance man’, who had taught theology, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, economics (he was the first person to study the economics of the third world), sociology and a few other topics at Yale, Princeton and Boston College.

Not everyone is good at that wide a range of topics, but a decent engineer can show a working prototype in about the time most suits can put together a PowerPoint.

I get the same kind of attitude, although I primarily learned how to code to write my own sequencer, when the only things commercially available were either $150,000, or an eight note arpeggiator. I wrote that in 6502 assembler, and the lack of any sense to assembler resulted in my having forgotten how to write it within about 3 months :).

I still make music, I played soccer at a high level (semi-pro) until I was in my thirties, after work, of course. I mess around with old Mercedes-Benz’s (as a kid, my first choice of career was to be a mechanic, since I was born with crippling arthritis in my hands, my second choice was to be Aristotle).

I’ve published a book on the nature of the self and am in the top 2% most read on academia.edu, without having ever worked in academia. Very few of my papers have anything whatsoever to do with programming. I tend to write about that more on Medium.

But as you say, as soon as you admit to knowing how to write software, you’re written off at being decent at anything else.