IT Career Without Coding

[Daithi]

We have a project manager working for us who has zero experience coding -- and she's actually a pretty good project manager. She started as kind of a customer liaison between our clients and the programming staff. We were, and still are, creating a lot of interfaces between our Laboratory Information System and our client's Electronic Medical Records system. A lot of this requires getting approval on contracts, conducting meetings on who will be responsible for which pieces of an interface, lots of testing, the production of testing plans that everyone signs off on, weekly meetings to cover the progress, etc. The project manager facilitates all of this, and kind of works like a cat herder -- making sure programmers on both ends, client's, and senior management are all doing their jobs so that the project gets completed. The job did not exist when our project manager initially started with us. As I said, she started as a liaison between programmers and clients, but she kept on taking on more responsibility until she grew into the job.

[clep3705]

Exactly. Those in management, either true business unit managers or project managers, don't need to know how to code. Managers who can code sometimes make bad managers because they don't delegate coding tasks. Coding is a small part of IT.