[maudineormsby]

This is more or less my story as well.

I graduated from college with a philosophy degree and took a job in marketing. That job wasn't really marketing, despite the title, and I ended up spearheading a digital marketing effort that was 95% technical project management. That was the point when I realized I wanted to be the person making the products, not managing the people making them.

So I did everything I could to get closer to the technology. I quit my job in the non-profit sector and moved to Chicago, took a job as a project manager at a technology/marketing company, learned QA processes, taught myself python over 12 months, built some scripts to automate tedious parts of my job, and eventually got a job in Automated QA.

Now I'm an engineer in SF Bay Area at a startup. And yes, every day I go home and realize that my brain is wrung out, my mind is exhausted, and I am totally happy with it.

[valisystem]

> And yes, every day I go home and realize that my brain is wrung out, my mind is exhausted, and I am totally happy with it.

I had this issue the first two years I worked full time as a developer. It disappeared eventually.

[maudineormsby]

Hmm, I really hope it doesn't go away. It's the best part of the job. I have seen a number of my peers still doing this after many years, and still experiencing the same thing.

[kine]

It's a great feeling though

[eru]

So they put you in a managing position without you having the faintest idea of how to develop software yourself?

[maudineormsby]

I wish that all project managers knew how to write code. In my experience this is not the case. None of the time that I spent managing software projects was while I knew how to code. That's about 1 year doing vendor evaluation for a non-profit, 11 months doing requirements docs and manual QA, and 7 months in a 'Scrummaster' role.

[tonylampada]

If you find that so surprising, you should consider yourself a lucky developer ;-)

[znt]

Don't you need a relevant degree to call yourself an 'engineer'?

[sukuriant]

"Software Developer Engineer", no matter what the degree they went to school for, still has the title of "engineer"

[eru]

Depends on jurisdiction.