Why I suck at coding but still do it
I fell in love with computers and particularly with programming since the very moment I got my first computer. I think I was about 8 years old when an Amstrad CPC 464 magically appeared in my room, brought by the Three Wise Men. With that wonderful machine I wrote my first lines of code in BASIC:
10 PRINT “Hola”
20 GOTO 10
RUNThat moment changed my life forever.
After that came many other computers and programming languages, tons of math, data structures, algorithms, memory management, patterns… programming professionally for a salary, and so on. The common thread in all of this is the ultimate satisfaction — that profound sense of arriving at an ‘eureka’ moment after having put in a lot of time and effort. The moment when you finally figure out the solution and can shout at the top of your lungs: “It works!” The intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of solving it made it all worthwhile.
And yet, at some point I started to realize that coding makes up only a small fraction of software development and that the majority of challenges actually stem from people dynamics, the business intricacies, and our ways of working. Being the curious person that I am, I also found all of these aspects very intriguing as solving or improving them has a great impact on any organization. So I became a manager.
A manager with a strong technical side, sure, but nonetheless a manager who, by definition, has a different focus and priorities than a specialist. And I had to pay a price for that: the technical skill set started to degrade.
This is fine, but that level of “degradation” needs to be controlled somehow as I don’t want to lose that skill completely for quite a few reasons:
- I strongly believe a certain level of technical knowledge is important to be a better manager in any technical domain (note that I used the word “better”, not “good”)
- It may become more difficult to understand day-to-day problems and some issues might not get the right kind of attention or priority because the manager has lost touch with “reality”
- Making decisions without a certain level of understanding could lead to wrong approaches
This is why, even if my coding skills were not what they used to be (maybe they were never brilliant actually, but that’s for another post), I still force myself to keep at it at times. Coding is, after all, a contact sport and I believe you need to train your muscles (your brain in this case) to become better and better at this. Thus, I do some small hands-on stuff every now and then: fix some bugs, do some internal tooling, quite a bit of technical reading…
The last thing I did in that regard was to join an internal Scoro Hackathon as a team member. Yes, I mean a hacker, and not as a mentor or a jury member, as one might expect from a VP of Engineering.
Damn, how much I missed it and how much I enjoyed it! It was two and a half days full of coding, long and intense periods of focus, discussions, back-and-forths, frustrations, apparent dead ends, new tech with the challenge of making it work properly… and finally that “eureka” moment and the “it works!” at the end, which made everything worth it. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it. It was simply fantastic!
We have hackathons every 6 months around some specific topic which is known in advance. This one in particular was about AI and it was extraordinarily organised by Liis Pass and Martin Anvelt. Nine ideas were pitched, five teams were formed, each supported by dedicated mentors. Five jury members evaluated the outcome based on how valuable the idea was for our customers, how ready the solution was by the end of the hackathon, how easily it could be monetized, and how well it was pitched and demoed. The end results were astonishing in many cases and all teams reached very far. A truly remarkable event, which I got to experience in a very different way this time since I participated only as a juror in the previous one.
To summarize my train of thought, I want to remark the following:
- For a manager in a context where technical accountability exists, coding is not the most important (not even one of the main ones) skills to posses, and that is totally fine
- However, it is important for managers to maintain a certain level of knowledge and skills to avoid “losing touch with reality”
- Assessing situations without certain knowledge can lead to suboptimal decision-making
- Doing some type of hands-on work every now and then is of utmost importance for managers
- Never completely give up on your passion and what makes your eyes light up!
If you’re passionate about working with exciting technologies and want to help us implement them, check out our open positions at https://www.scoro.com/careers/.
