How You Waste Money When You Don’t Know How to Code

Here’s a guy.

He works in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

“Creative Director” they call him. Well, he isn’t introduced that way, but if you saw him; you’d know. He doesn’t give pep talks. Doesn’t own a car. He donates to NPR, and cares deeply about Meatless Mondays.

He’s changing the world. Or so he thinks.

Because… while his non-profit has been steadily raising money for water in Africa (over $2m came in from donors just this year!) …a fat chunk of that cash has already been lost. Lost on spaghetti code and fucking abysmal project management.

If you’re going to be working with a web development team you should know, at the very least, some coding fundamentals. Otherwise, you’re likely wasting money. Money that might be your savings, your company’s investment, or money that is owed to a group of children 7,500 miles from America.

Here are 5 reasons you waste money not knowing how to code:

1. It takes you 30 minutes to understand a basic coding concept

“So…. tell me again, the CSS is doing the who?”

2. You have to ask your developer to make every little change

“Hey Tom, can I see the text in Red?”, you ask, “Blue?”, “Dragon Green?”, “Honey Yellow?”

If you knew just a little bit of code you might be able to check it out the text editor yourself, or even update the CSS (it’s not that difficult). Okay, not that you should, but if you could then at least you’d know how long it takes.

You might also just use Chrome’s Web Inspector (which could test out all 4 of those colors in less than one minute), saving you and your developer a lot of back and forth time on revisions.

All tips that come within the first 20 hours (or so) of learning to code.

3. You Hire the wrong people

4. You chose the wrong language!

“Should we use CSS, XML, SSL, or CMS?”

5. You can’t properly estimate a project

In programming, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy, and the virtually impossible. Knowing how to code makes that easier.

During my career I’ve watched tens of thousands of dollars slip away from non-profits — mostly due to mismanaged developers, and poor technology choices. Money that could have been literally feeding children in Africa!

I used to work for a non-profit. It was dark period. But it doesn’t have to always be that way.

Even if you don’t work at a non-profit, I’m sure you’d like to save some money: learning to code helps project managers manage better, it makes team leaders more confident, and most importantly it makes you look more attractive.

Got Questions?

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