Are there any IT Skills that require high intelligence

[GJABS]

I'm not sure how you could do that job for 20 years without becoming incredibly frustrated.

I would not describe myself as particularly smart, but after 1 year of specialising purely in high performance tuning of Oracle databases in the late 90s, I was becoming frustrated. After 2 years i had had enough, and needed a new challenge. I lasted 1 more year as I transitioned over to different skills. I cannot imagine 20 years of this.

If your thinking velocity is still high, I would suggest participating in some coding dojos or codewars/ competitions. Not necessarily a destination to what you want to achieve, but perhaps a gateway to something more fulfilling you will discover along the way.

Good luck.

Discipline, I think, was what has kept me going. But not going very well, I'm coming to realise.

[ladymuck]

My older brother is a data scientist contractor. Interestingly he says his chief problem with contract roles is that he tends to get diverted away from doing data science, which he wants to do, towards data engineering which is less interesting. I wonder whether this might be happening because there might be more demand for data engineering skills in the marketplace, than data science, despite it requiring a little less brain-power. Which might undermine my reasoning for going after a job requiring high intelligence...

...

I suspect it's because the client doesn't actually know what they want and think data engineering is the same as data science.

[Paracelsus]

I think programming at a high level does. Like, complicated assembly-programming, cutting-edge Google/Facebook type work, very mathematical finance stuff, writing compilers etc. Whereas more basic programming like accounting software or simple website work requires moderate intelligence but mostly learning and practising standards and APIs etc. The same for tech/application support, DBA - that's mostly knowing a product really well along with troubleshooting techniques as opposed to understanding and putting into practise really complicated concepts.

If you have that basic IT intelligence of generally knowing how computers work and, importantly, knowing how to look for an answer on the web, then lots of IT jobs are just layering knowledge on top of that and don't require big-brain IQ IMO.

I dropped out of University doing Comp Sci because the maths was too hard, so I'm a bit clever but nothing more, I could (I assume) never be a quant programmer, but I've done basic development, app support, Windows stuff, networking, none of which were terribly difficult for the grey matter.

I do Advent of Code every year, get so far in and then completely stall because of the maths/concepts involved. There must be jobs which the people who get 100% (and in a much, much, much faster time) can do that I can't, and I assume these are all high-level programming jobs.