Project Management usually involves problem solving and technical tool usage without ever being involved in actual coding.
I guess a good place to start is what you do like about the industry, and possibly what you don’t like about coding.
If you’re really into problem solving despite not wanting to code, maybe something in the product or UX direction would be appropriate, where you’re figuring out how to best turn what the business wants into software that a customer will use. UX is more of a focus on how users might interact with the software.
If you’ve got a knack for organising time and clear communication, some places have specific project management roles separate from the product management.
Depending on the organisation, QA/Test engineers might not write much (if any) code, though in others they may be expected to write a lot.
Some places might have engineering managers/team leads that are fundamentally people managers rather than being particularly technical. Though most organisations would probably expect familiarity with the technologies your team would be building with, so it might be tough to get in at that level without having to go through a standard engineering role first.
Unless I’m forgetting something, anything else I can think of is going to need some amount of coding or expect you to have a decent amount of experience with it in your past
I would add information security, which requires a lot of theory, but not always a lot of coding.
Also help desk / IT work, which is hands on with technology, but not theory intensive (usually).
Devops usually requires a lot of coding these days, but there was a time, and such roles may still exist, where the system administration tasks of capacity planning, backups, disaster recovery, purchasing, rack & stack, and access controls would keep you quite busy without much coding.
A couple other thoughts… Security - not my field but my understanding is you need to understand how programs work but don’t necessarily need to code. For example you need to understand how string buffers work to be able to look for buffer overflow attacks.
Network administration - how do you apply server updates? How often do you update clients? How much replication of active directory is enough but not overkill?
Database administrator - how do you do load balancing? How do you handle backups? How do you deploy new databases?
PhD student
Computer Science specifically or something more general in the computing/software/IT space?
Computer Science (correct me if Im wrong, but imo) is about coding / theory of computing / generally very technical.
In a more general software career you could look at
- UX/UI design
- business analysis
- testing
- system administration
etc
I used CS as that’s the name of the community, but I guess the broader software/IT space also works.
Yeah I just wanted to clarify your question, thats all
If you did system architecture (ansible, terraform), it’s just yaml or hcl config files
Logistics would make sense to me. Less coding, algorithmic thinking still very valuable!
One example I have is implementation consultant. Still related to software, but no need to write code.
Sounds like sales, basically. I don’t know - the distinction between writing code and configuration is pretty minimal to me. Lots of times you still have to read/debug code to figure out why a configuration isn’t working, and if you’re thinking you aren’t doing to get that technical then you’re limiting your career to junior roles, I think. Senior engineers aren’t going to want to support low level technical issues, and if you have a junior fixing all the problems you run into I’m thinking that’s a junior level role.
That’s not my area, but I’ve worked in consulting as a developer almost my entire twenty five year career, in a bunch of industries, and done sales engineering (basically preparing and running demos and answering technical questions) including for third party software which I integrated but didn’t code. To my earlier point, getting it running and training folks to use it involved coding skills.
If what you’re hoping to avoid is the deep math and algorithms the goods news is you’ll probably never once do that level of stuff over in your career. And that is essentially the difference between coding and coding-adjacent jobs. A coder will probably never do that, anyone else definitely won’t.
That all being said, technical sales, scrum master, product/project owner are all industry jobs that involve no coding at all - the primary skills for them are coordination and soft skills. Q/A can be but most folks in Q/A I know spend a lot of time scripting tests, which is generally just coding.
What is CS without coding? Serious question.
Theoretical Computer Science is a whole research field that doesn’t care about programming, for one
Coding is a relatively minor portion of software development - the big problems are design related.
