The desire to move to development from adjacent disciplines—QA, (dev)ops, high-level support—appears to be powerful and widespread. Folks in these adjacent disc

The desire to move to development from adjacent disciplines—QA, (dev)ops, high-level support—appears to be powerful and widespread. Folks in these adjacent disciplines seem to have development built up in their heads as something uniquely challenging that only people smarter than themselves can do, and that’s unfortunate, because it’s not true. There are levels to any profession, and I’ve met tons of non-devs who have risen to such a high level that they clearly have the capacity to be developers. There are positions even in that “shameful” discipline, support, that are clearly more intellectually demanding than lower-level dev positions. Most people who’ve worked with VMWare support know how demanding their support engineer role is, and it should be no surprise that it’s compensated accordingly ($80K+). I think the real gap between devs and non-devs is one of interest and initiative. Software development (and programming in general) is something that anyone with enough interest and determination can just start doing, completely on their own. The result of this is that non-devs often compare themselves to “junior” developers who actually have 10+ years of experience, and get discouraged. It’s not that the junior dev is smarter than you: it’s that he’s been writing code for a lot longer than you think.