[tfinniga]

I agree.. I was talking with a CFO about one of his employees, who he called his secret weapon - an accountant with coding skills. The ability to do a regular job plus the ability to code is extremely valuable.

In architecture there is a trend of computational design - if you google for 'designed with grasshopper', you'll see some amazing shapes. The best designs don't come from the best programmers, they come from the best architects and designers who also know how to code.

Maybe it would be possible for them to become professional programmers, but I think it's much more valuable for them to be hybrids. Not every job can benefit from coding skills, but software is eating the world and learning how to code is becoming more and more widely applicable and useful.

That said, I think most people can learn to code, but I don't think _everyone_ can learn how to code. I have worked with a few people in menial jobs that I honestly don't believe could learn how to code. I realize that this is a pedantic assertion about corner cases, but I am a programmer. :)

[bradleyjg]

In theory this is true, but in practice a common pattern is that Joe is a superstar accountant/lawyer because he can code and uses that to do his job better. This becomes known to his co-workers and boss. Six months down the road he's spending a huge portion of his week helping Mike with this one little excel macro or Mary with automatically generating contracts. He also gets called in when a message pops up on the screen about the virus scanner finding something because "you're good with computers and those IT guys always take forever". He does less and less legal or accounting work, and when he tries to get a raise or find another job it turns out that he's no longer a great hire as an accountant but he also can't compete with programmers that have had programming jobs. He's stuck in this weird hybrid spot that doesn't have even have a name and no one hires for it.

Maybe that'll change in the future, but for now the wiser course may be to keep your superpowers to yourself.

[business_colby]

Yep, I find myself in a somewhat similar situation. I'm a business analyst who taught myself enough front-end skills to build a JS app that replaces an old legacy application we have. The result saved us dev resources(because it completely avoided the standard waterfall timeline), but has now given way to "if we don't have dev resources, let's give this task to him."

Which is fine, but the tasks that go down that path aren't really enough to point me toward a full-time dev gig. So I'm in a weird middle ground between being a PM/BA/Developer without acquiring full experience in any of the three roles right now.

That being said, if I had to do it again I'd do the same thing. Just not sure how to navigate out of it.