I work with a lot of "non software" engineers that write a lot of software. To paraphrase an exec at a meeting some time ago, "every company is a software comp

I work with a lot of "non software" engineers that write a lot of software. To paraphrase an exec at a meeting some time ago, "every company is a software company - some haven't realized it yet" (this was in the context of a moderately sized domestic manufacturer). There's obviously a difference between production software engineering and day to day scripting, but if you're not heavily investing in developing software skills for engineers of all trades you're losing a lot of ground in design and production automation to competitors. So I would say that there isn't a transition so much as a decision, just start coding parts of your job. Decent rule of thumb is never do the same task more than twice. There's also tons of value in being a domain expert that can read and write code - if you're in a highly technical field there's almost certainly a company trying to automate your expertise. Try and find the people doing it and help them out!