Are you Useless If you dont Know How To “Code”nah
nah
Spend too much time with engineering perfectionists and you would think the obvious answer to this question is yes. But talk to a CEO (the person who marries the engineers and salespeople) and you will get the real answer.
The truth is that the “soft-skill” people are just as important as the “hard-skill” people.
Now let’s back up a second and clarify something. I believe that an individual’s skill level cannot be justified in two buckets — most people lie on a spectrum — specializing and possessing skills along the soft-hard line. Hard skills are easy to describe — “tangible thing you can do.” But soft skills are tricky. How are you supposed to show that you are valuable? How can you prove you are a hustler via a cold email? Where do you add value?
Soft-skills are super important and a lot of companies fail because they do not prioritize them. Here are a few:
- Communication: This is something I have noticed working in Venture Capital — a lot of companies are extremely deficient in this category. You communicate all of the time as a founder — always selling your company.
- Leadership: The best companies have the best leaders. This does not have to be the loudest leaders as depicted on tv, but rather leaders that are able to inspire and capture value from employers.
There are a lot more soft skills. The problem though is that they hard to quantify.
This is a struggle that I have dealt with for a while. I am studying computer science now in college — but I am not a senior software developer. My code is not in the same equation as an expert’s. So what can you do?
The first is get as much experience as you can. Start doing things today.
^ That is kind of a cop out answer — how can I get experience if I do not know how to code?
Well, the answer is you have to hustle. You will not be able to send out a github link or a portfolio of your “work.” Instead you need to win in every other part of your workplace.
You need to familiarize yourself with talking to people who code, though you do not have to do the typing. To become an effective leader, it is really helpful to understand how long it takes to “code,” or even better, which language or subset of languages will be needed.
Start doing this by hanging out with more programmers and participating in their conversations on and off-line.
So no you don’t have to know how to code to add value to a tech company.
+1 for cs tho.
Woah. You read the whole thing! Thank you so much. I’d really appreciate if you shared this with a friend!
Let’s continue this conversation
twitter — @jrdngonen
email — jordangonen@wustl.edu
By jordangonen on June 3, 2016.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.