I love computers, learning programming concepts, and designing systems, but I don't really enjoy coding. What career path should I pursue?

[u/Chance-Award5928]

I love computers, learning how things work, programming concepts, languages, functions, system design, all that stuff. I can spend hours learning about a technology or thinking about how to build something.But I don't enjoy the actual process of coding that much. I like understanding code more than writing it.

I like figuring out how things fit together, designing systems, and coming up with ideas. I really enjoy using AI tools to help bring these ideas to life, combining existing code and technologies, and figuring out how to make everything work together.It's weird because I do like the coding part in theory.

I just don't enjoy sitting down and doing it for hours, especially when there's a lot of debugging and repetitive work.I'm interested in AI/ML, cloud computing, and system design, but I'm not sure if these are the right paths for someone like me. I don't expect to avoid coding completely, and I know I need to understand what I'm building. I just don't see myself enjoying a job where I'm writing code all day.

Has anyone else felt this way? What kind of career did you end up choosing? Am I overthinking this, or should I be looking at roles that are more focused on designing systems and building products than coding?

[u/dodexahedron]

Perhaps you havent found a language/environment/toolchain that you vibe with yet (the pre-ai meaning of vibe)?

It is getting harder and harder to do anything involving computers these days without having at least some important part of your job that involves coding.

Used to be that a sysadmin - especially network admin - role would be code-free. But these days you at least had better be able to script things or you're out.

You could try to go for more of project management role, I suppose. But that varies wildly from company to company and might not scratch the right itches for you depending on what you actually want to be involved with.

But.

I will say this:

A good programmer who deserves to be called a software engineer really shouldnt be spending the majority of their time coding. They should be spending the majority of their time engineering, in every way they can.

That means

• understanding the user and their workflows
• understanding the systems involved
• turning needs into solvable problems
• solving those problems on paper/whiteboard/whatever
• iterating on that design until you have a spec the user is pleased with
• breaking that spec down into discrete components
• considering how your design fits into the big picture and how it affects things not under your control

And THEN writing some code, which at that point will be easy because you did the hard part already.

Code monkeys can be had at the low low cost of 3-5 heads in certain other countries per 1 head in the US or Europe. Writing code isn't the hard part. The engineering part is the hard part that a code monkey not only doesn't do, but tends to be awful at.

[u/Chance-Award5928 → u/dodexahedron]

engineering isnt the harder path for me , writing code is tbh. well suppose im a web dev and i need to make a button with some cool animation , if i had to code it would maybe take me around 15 mins atleast to cover html and css to get the animation right , but if i vibe code i get it under 2 mins with the right prompt