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by dexwiz
862 days ago
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Do you want to work with technology or be a software engineer? There are plenty of careers that deal with using or creating software that aren't software engineering. Product management, UX, product research roles for the development side and solutions engineers and solutions architect roles for the services side comes to mind. There is also demand for people with real world experience to join software companies to help build software for their previous Industry. I could be the best developer in the world, but any legal software I could make would suck because I don't know anything about the legal industry. Also coding/programming is a skill, not a job. You don't have to be an engineer to code. Similar to how not everyone who writes is an author. Learning to code and wanting to become a software engineer is advertised as the same thing, but its really not. Also the job of a software engineer really isn't coding past a certain point, its taking fuzzy business requirements and turning them into technical specifications capable of being implemented. Coding is just a detail at that point, like pouring concrete is a detail of construction to an architect. I would recommend automating tasks at or building tools for your current job. I personally started in tech support and moved into engineering. But 95% of the people who were in tech support with me are either still in support or moved into services, so its not exactly a golden path. I was only able to make the switch because I was building tools for other support reps, and I was able to pivot that into a full time internal tools developer position. Also bootcamps have peaked. Maybe do one out of interest, but don't expect it to turn easily into a full time position like its 2015. |
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Big companies are hyper-specialized and have many different types of coders, each of which can't do the others' jobs as effectively. They rarely have sufficient training or cross proficiency programs between them, much less for someone else in the company who doesn't code at all.
Smaller companies will need you to wear many hats and use different skills to a lower (but still adequate) proficiency, but that's not the same as not knowing how to do any of it.
What coworkers CAN offer is exposure. Like if you joined a company doing legal work but regularly working with product owners, project managers, UX designers, marketers, frontend, backend, devops, QA, SRE, etc., you can get a better feel for what each of those roles is like, and that can help inform what you might want to learn.