•  vrek   ( @vrek@programming.dev ) 
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    65 months ago

    A couple other thoughts… Security - not my field but my understanding is you need to understand how programs work but don’t necessarily need to code. For example you need to understand how string buffers work to be able to look for buffer overflow attacks.

    Network administration - how do you apply server updates? How often do you update clients? How much replication of active directory is enough but not overkill?

    Database administrator - how do you do load balancing? How do you handle backups? How do you deploy new databases?

    • Sounds like sales, basically. I don’t know - the distinction between writing code and configuration is pretty minimal to me. Lots of times you still have to read/debug code to figure out why a configuration isn’t working, and if you’re thinking you aren’t doing to get that technical then you’re limiting your career to junior roles, I think. Senior engineers aren’t going to want to support low level technical issues, and if you have a junior fixing all the problems you run into I’m thinking that’s a junior level role.

      That’s not my area, but I’ve worked in consulting as a developer almost my entire twenty five year career, in a bunch of industries, and done sales engineering (basically preparing and running demos and answering technical questions) including for third party software which I integrated but didn’t code. To my earlier point, getting it running and training folks to use it involved coding skills.

      If what you’re hoping to avoid is the deep math and algorithms the goods news is you’ll probably never once do that level of stuff over in your career. And that is essentially the difference between coding and coding-adjacent jobs. A coder will probably never do that, anyone else definitely won’t.

      That all being said, technical sales, scrum master, product/project owner are all industry jobs that involve no coding at all - the primary skills for them are coordination and soft skills. Q/A can be but most folks in Q/A I know spend a lot of time scripting tests, which is generally just coding.