I hate coding, but it's all that's on my resume. What do I do?

Coding is a virus, a meme. What you've got is 12 years of experience breaking down problems, abstraction, functional analysis, debugging.

You have skills which other parts of the business cycle need.

If you aren't a "people person" then look to problem solving in logistics: the routing and scheduling behind everyday delivery is a heinous problem. Or, in the construction, mining and related sector. "for the want of a nail" problems abound.

(hint: root cause analysis? duck typing in a process debug?)

Operations Research: linear programming to derive the maximally efficient solution to a problem. Its everywhere.

Epidemiology: Go be a gun-for-hire in stats or data analytics for somebody with smarts in another space, drowning in data. Yea, you have to code. So what! the code will be fascinating and totally different

If you are a "people person" then non-product spaces like health are full of middle manager roles. And.. gues what: its logistics, scheduling, process analysis, root cause analysis. Supply chain behind masks and gowns has become pretty topical...

I've been there. My personal take is that the day in and day out life of a coder sucks, big time. Humans weren't designed for it. If you are inventing something novel and new and actually 'engineering' then that's different, but pulling the next React feature from some PM's backlog, that's hell.

Look at your cohort, I would venture it's mostly 20 somethings men. Maybe the odd older guy but certainly not a diverse set of people. It's a young man's game because the burn out is real and for most people coding is just an unsustainable profession. Come to grips with the fact that maybe it is unsustainable for you.

It's a lot less tedious and easier in many regards working as an engineering manager. Or a product manager. Or something entirely different. Coding as a career isn't for everybody (wasn't for me). YMMV. If it isn't for you figure out how to change it, it might not be easy but it is probably worth it.

Source: ex-FAANG SDE.

Just an hour ago I read an article from a psychotherapist that dealt somewhat about changing careers. I think the gist of it was some people might have to learn how to deal with disappoing their snobby parents and strangers when taking a step back to evaluate different potential careers, including those that pay substantially less, in order to find a more exciting career that, overall, adds more value to your life despite not outwardly looking impressive to strangers. Something to think about?

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/what-should-tr...

Do you know what you want to do? Do that. Don't know what you want to do? Sit around and be bored for a while. Your natural curiosity will kick in. Follow where it leads.

if writing software is what you don't like, you could try to go into something where you use software, rather than writing it, like a database administrator, a sysadmin, a systems analyst, or working in IT, or you could focus on a different role in software production, like usability/design/ui/ux, requirements engineering, QA, etc., or if teaching is something you might be interested in, consider teaching cs/programming courses, you could do the same thing there, if code is what you don't like, and teach courses about the things around writing code, as an example, the course I've enjoyed the most in my Computer Engineering program was about a lot of things around the code-writing in software production, there was only one programming assignment in the whole semester

maybe you'd like a managerial role? or if there's something you're interested you could try to get a job in that, in one of the courses in the EE portion of my Engineering program, a professor told us that after finishing all courses, with just about 4 more courses we could pursue Audio/Sound Engineering as a Career, if that interested us, it's basically some of the fundamentals, applied to sound signals, you could consider something like that

if you don't want anything to do with software... then I'm not sure what to recommend, give some more info about yourself?

like if you would think being a Mechanic is something you'd want... I've heard soldering (like heavy machinery soldering) can be very profitable, and fun, and the training for it takes around 6 months? something like that

Get your TEFL certificate. Teach english online to Chinese kids or move to foreign country and teach english.

In general, you can't get a job in X without experience in X. The irony has been recognized for generations. But if you have experience in X, what you can do is get a job doing X but do some Y at the same company as sort of a volunteer. People will often share some of their grunt work with you if you don't insist on getting any credit or money for it.

But then, you get experience in Y. If you're good enough (sometimes just meaning hard-working enough), you might get recognized for it and offered an opening doing more Y if they decide they need someone. If not, you'll still have genuine "professional experience" in Y to put on your resume.

I've felt similarly, on and off, my whole career (7 years since my first SWE internship). Unfortunately I've not got the answers but I do have a thought I want feedback on.

Maybe it's ok not to love it but to be satisfied regardless. It's an in demand, well paid, flexible, reasonably interesting (even if I would never miss it) career that allows me to lead a great life in other aspects without giving up too much. Can't that be enough?

I worry that the current narrative of having to 'love' your job is damaging and causing me (and maybe you) to always be searching for the 'perfect' career which doesn't exist.

I have the same problem. I just started at FAANG, make good money, and I. Am. So. Miserable. I studied so hard for this job and now all I want is out. The day to day logic is burning out my mind and making it hard to enjoy life

I worked as a software developer part-time throughout school but never enjoyed software development. Although I did enjoy other parts of CS such as cryptography. After school finished, I was attending local meetups to find out different opportunities in IT industry. At a local security meetup, I met a security consultant (pentester)and ended up chatting with him. As his work was interesting, I applied to a few security consulting companies. Since then, I have been working as a pentester for 3 years now and I am pretty happy with it. Maybe you could think about a similar change.

Lots of good advice in here, my piece of advice is just to make sure you cater that resume to the job you are looking for. As others have pointed out you have gained skills during your work that can easily apply to other areas, so you just need to showcase that on paper and in the interview.

Unfortunately I’m sort of in the opposite boat, I don’t know how to code and have never successful pushed myself to learn much. A previous instructor told me “maybe you just like the idea of it”.

Several former coworkers who had 6-8 years of experience and were roughly at the senior/staff engineer level moved on to "investor" positions with Bay Area venture capital firms. They scout out employees for startups in their firm's portfolio and serve as occasional advisers.

...But if this option was available to you, you wouldn't be here, asking this question.

How about pursuing a software architecture role? You would be creating diagrams that depict code instead of writing code.

Have someone help you update your resume to make it sell you for something else. Pick two or three job adverts that appeal to you, do a brain dump of pertinent info, have someone help you turn that into a resume that says "I'm qualified to do this other job."

What do you want to do other than coding?

Different careers have different paths and ins and outs.

Do you have enough financial resources for a transition? How much time can you invest in changing your career? Life is long. You can reinvent yourself. But money often comes in the way.

Have you considered transitioning to DevOps? Assuming you like operations, of course.