I’m not really asking for advice on what you think I should do for a career. I want to know what kind of jobs there are that have a high salary, but are also well-suited for anti-socials (such as myself).
I don’t have any problem dealing with co-workers and superiors, I’m just not interested in having a job where I have to deal with external vendors or customers. While I can certainly do all that very well, I just don’t want to. I also don’t want to have to represent a team or department in any kind of meetings, just myself.
So, any suggestions on what jobs there are out there like this? Something that pays well and is well-suited for introverts? Something low on the corporate food chain, but still high-salary?
Almost any hardcore technical job will meet your low interaction specs but unless you are some genius level inventor the bigger bucks generally go those who can schmooze with others and communicate their ideas effectively. Unless you are super, super, super good at something to point of being indispensible, high pay and low social interaction are not variables that usually march together. The hermits with fortunes stories you see are generally people that died after a long lifetime of investing (conservatively) in the stock market.
An experienced merchant marine office or captain males good cheese but it takes a while to climb the ladder and the work is difficult and physically demanding.
Become a software architect. Not an application programmer: a guru who really knows his way around the guts of an operating system, can debug anyway, reads assembler like it’s a novel, etc.
Such people can get away with amazing social flaws. They’re like the crazy cousins in the company. And they make huge bucks - often they make more money than the people managing them.
Many of the attorneys who work in so-called “BIGLAW” firms have very little interaction with people outside their immediate circle. And they make lots of money.
Lots of people are only going to have interaction with their co-workers and management - but it depends on which company you work for. Lots of technical roles require no customer or vendor interaction, but plenty do. Lots of corporate finance people would never deal with customers as well. Most engineers won’t deal with customers directly. These jobs all pay well…you ought to start with what you are good at and where your interests lie and then find a specialization or field where you can be insulate.
Incidentally, software architect is hardly synonymous with “hacker-guru” - most architects I know can’t even read C much less assembler. Architecture has more to do with mapping software components to distributed hardware systems and other high-level design tasks. If you know a “hacker-guru” with the title “Architect”, its probably because that was the only way management could justify their salary to personnel…its hard for many people to understand why you need “hacker-gurus” and how rare they are.
Customers and vendors are non-existant, and co-workers and supervisors are minimal. You’ll just get the occasional cop who questions you regarding a murder.
Inventer. If you stay inside a room for a few years and just think about new inventions, you’re bound to come up with something that’ll make you a good amount of money.
Get your M.D/PhD degree and become a research medical doctor. This is what I plan to do. The salary is at least $150,000. Live at poverty level and invest all your extra money. This allows you to invest $135,000 in the stock market per year. You’re guaranteed to become a multiple millionaire in a decade.
