Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question about other software jobs.
No coding.
If you don’t like coding, this question is for you.
This video is for you.
This question is from James and he says, "This is a quick question.
I'm finishing school this spring (2 semesters = a year) and I've had experience in the software
development field through internships.
About 2 years of internship experience, I don’t think I want to write code anymore
because it bores me.
I will have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems and an Associate of Applied
Business.
What other jobs can you recommend?
I still want to do something somewhat technical but don’t want to be writing code at a computer
all day anymore.
I want to talk to people more and be able to get out of the office.
I think I like writing code more as my own hobby and not as a job."
Okay.
This is a perfectly valid question.
Let's see.
What kind of job?
I don’t know of anyone in the software development field that does some kind of a job that doesn’t
involve writing code.
I can't think of—can you guys think of anyone?
Anyone who does that?
So yeah.
I do that.
Hey, wait.
What's going on?
I actually like writing code though, but it's just not the best use of my time because I
got to make videos because I talk to you all about improving your life and achieving your
dreams.
There's a lot of different opportunities, I think.
Obviously, you can do something like what I'm doing, is you can blog about software
development or you can do something that helps software developers in some way.
If you want to do something more on the technical side, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the
software development field.
There is business analyst.
You can be the person who translates business requirements to developers.
You could be the one that actually stands out and actually does understand the coding
side really well and understand the business, and then does that.
You can also be an IT like help desk developer person.
So there's a lot of roles where you're not necessarily writing code all day, but you're
doing developer support.
For example, Microsoft has some of these roles where they're actually doing phone support
for software developers.
They're getting into the nitty-gritty details of the code and they're supporting actual
developers that are writing code or using the tools where they're not necessarily writing
code all day, but they're getting to do kind of the fun stuff.
At least for them it is probably, might for you be fun to not have to write the code but
to help other people write code.
There's technical writers who write documentation and stuff like that.
I don’t know if that's something that you're interested, but you could do that.
There's DevOps where you can take your coding experience and your skills with coding.
You don’t have to write code all day, but you can go and you can help build deployment
systems that you can deploy the software that developers are writing.
It's sort of like being kind of between an infrastructure person and a developer.
There's roles where you could be a solution architect where you're going out and you're
working for a company, where you're going out and you're going to clients and you are
coming up with the architecture of the solution that's going to be developed and you're not
going to write the code yourself, but you're going to have developers that work on your
team that you're going to communicate to them what needs to be built, and you're defining
the architecture.
I'm trying to think of some other ones that you could do.
You could go into testing, QA, quality assurance, where you're going to—you could do something
like testing where you do test automation.
That might actually be fun where I found that to be a really fun thing to do, which is basically
you're going to write automated tests.
It is a lot of coding but it's something more than just coding.
You could go into sort of the hybrid where you're doing some programming, but you're
creating things that actually write.
There's this whole maker type of movement that's been going on where you can actually
build like circuit boards and you can build robotics and stuff like that.
There's a lot of different things that I think that you could probably do with that kind
of computer science knowledge without having to necessarily code all day.
You just got to look around and see what's out there, what kind of job opportunities
are out there that you might be interested in that would be an intersection of that.
If you really, really don’t like coding at all, you might want to just switch fields
and get out of the software development industry completely.
That’s something to consider as well.
Don’t feel like just because you got a degree in computer science that you got to stick
with that.
If you don't like it, don't do it, go do something else.
Go learn something else.
I know a plenty of people that have switched careers midstream.
Heck, I'm doing—like I said, I'm doing something that has nothing to do really with programming
anymore, even though I actually like programming.
There's no reason why you can't switch out of that if you don’t like it, but there
are plenty of roles that are definitely around software development that don't involve just
sitting there and writing code all day.
I will tell you one other thing, is that even if you become a full-time software developer,
you're not going to be sitting around and writing code all day.
You're using a lot of time in meetings and doing architecture and designing systems.
Writing code all day is not what you end up doing as a software developer.
Just so you know.
Maybe as an intern, they had you hacking out code all day, but as a software developer
in the real world, that is usually not the case.
There are some cases where developers do get to do that, but most of the time in my career
as a software developer, I never get to just sit and write code.
I would have loved to just sit and write code all day.
All right.
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Take care.