Yes! I was pleasantly surprised myself. That just means that HN is really good place.

Regarding your questions: you could follow advice mindcrime gave earlier, in 3 easy steps :)

Project management is another good option, though I wouldn't want technical things being replaced by paperwork.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks for your support.

Finding a "right" company can be challenging indeed.

If you don't mind... Could you elaborate a bit what do you mean by saying "[...]they lack the right mindset" ? What is the "right mindset" for developer?

I think you have to think logically and be able to make cognitive jumps.

For example realising that process A must be rolled back if midway though - therefore it is essentially an atomic transaction with all that entails. Or that the user opening a bunch of spreadsheets for a specific piece of data to fill in another form, is really just a key-value pair lookup on a relatively static dataset.

Bad business analysts I've encountered fail to understand the core process they are designing around, or take the user's explanation as gospel, even when there are gaping holes in the logic. They often define processes which to a developer are a simple problem that has been solved in many situations, in a completely odd way, where they have failed to make a conceptual leap from the problem they are solving, to one solved in other parts of the same system.

This recipe should be called "3 easy steps to become Six Sigma consultant". You could even write an ebook and sell it on the internet :)

On a serious note - I think the pattern is clear and it could be replicated successfully on different areas of life. Thank you for taking your time to present it here.

Thanks for the ideas. That link with the movie about startup iteration was really funny.

I'm familiar with ITIL. At work we calculate our SLAs etc. So that might be an option after all.