For those who can't code what are some of the most sought after skills in the job market?

There are a couple of guys like us, who cannot code so the possibility of landing a job with Yandex, Rostec, Kaspersky and other tech companies is out of question.

On the other hand you have jobs like Management Consulting, that pay well but then you need to get an engineering, MBA degree from a Tier I university to get a job with a well know firm like McKinsey for instance.

So in the experience of forum members, what are the other sough after skills that can help an individual to get a good paying job ?

Learn to code

Else, in Russia, the only types of job that pay higher than programming are upper-managerial roles.

Accounting and lawyering are not too far off though.

If you're into hands-on skills, then welding can be quite well-paid, but comes with health risks. Same deal with serving in the military on submarines.

Or you can create your own successful business.

Isos wrote:Companies like Kaspersky or yandex offer other jobs than just computing/engineering like human ressources, marketing, business ...

I realize that. But the problem is the salary in those areas that you mention are not high enough. Not enough to survive Moscow.

flamming_python wrote:Learn to code

True. But the thing with coding is, it takes years and years of practice to become proficient. Especially in Russia where in the job market, you're up against some of the best coders in the world, it is very difficult.

flamming_python wrote:Or you can create your own successful business.

Thanks. What would be a successful business ? For a successful startup you need to come up with a great idea.

I went to school with a guy who was very social and a very good communicator.... he went to university and liked computers but wasn't in to programming or anything hard core. He moved to the UK and used his people skills and his basic understanding of computers and made very very good money.

He basically found a large group of programmers and went to companies and made bids for contracts... they get paid big money to programme or implement upgrades or software or hardware changes and my friend manages it.

He can't code to save his own life but he knows enough about computers to get jobs for a group of people and he gets a percentage of their wages.

He gets them new jobs and contracts.

Many computer nerds don't have the skills to get jobs and have poor communication skills... my friend gets them jobs and earns a percentage of their wages... when he has 20-30 people working getting very good wages... well he is smarter than I am... and has better people skills too... always has a beautiful woman on his arm when I see him and hardly ever the same woman.

Try to learn communication skills... most people communicate with body language and if you can read that... getting a job should be no problem.

Of course don't expect a great job to start with... especially if you are not already working... often in big organisations the good jobs are known so people inside often get them before they are even put up. Get inside an organisation and you can often find you can move between jobs if you prove yourself to people there to be a good worker.

jhelb wrote:True. But the thing with coding is, it takes years and years of practice to become proficient. Especially in Russia where in the job market, you're up against some of the best coders in the world, it is very difficult.

When you're among good coders you'll learn from them

But the most important thing is self-motivation. Russia has some of the best coders as its school system and institutes are maths-heavy. However, most of the best methodologies, coding techniques and such innovations are all written down in English and were created in Western countries, and all the best books are in English.
If English is your native language you'll have a substantial advantage, as it will take you a fraction of the time to get through a book than it would for a Russian programmer (only the highest-profile books have been translated into Russian). Main thing is to be ready to put in the hours regardless, read and practice.

It does take years to become capable to the point where any company would be glad to have you. It comes down to experience. But the same is true for all proffesional fields.
With programming, if it does differ in some way, it's that here you should always be on top of your game and keep reading, learning and trying out new techniques. New technologies, languages come out yearly. Methodologies, best code practices are rapidly improving. Some older languages are going down in popularity and getting replaced by the later trends.
If you stop pushing yourself, you'll get left behind.

Thanks. What would be a successful business ? For a successful startup you need to come up with a great idea.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. I have plenty of ideas, and more come to me when I talk with my friends about their professions.
Once your interests and hobbies start developing, and you become a specialist in your work field too, you start to see other problems in life from new angles. If you're a programmer or another type of engineer, you start finding technical opportunities and ways to improve things. If you're say experienced in the travel industry, ideas will start coming into your head about all sorts of new activities and tours you can organize that people would find interesting and be ready to pay for.

I met up with my solicitor friend on a trip to London last year. He was telling me about how much time he's putting into researching cases, finding legal precedents and so on.

The idea came to me of creating a legal expert system, search engine and database, whereby any lawyer would put in the details of their case, and the system will come up with a bunch of relevant information, excerpts from books, applicable laws, records of past cases and the precedents they established, etc... would be a very useful tool, if something doesn't exist like that already. But even if it does, I doubt it would have all the features I envisage.

Well the problem is not with the idea. It's with the fact that I don't have the time for it; it would be a massive investment in effort. I have my day-job which I need to pay my mortgage, and my free time goes to another project at the moment that I'm also working on; which I forgot how it came to me - but it has to do with a passion of mine as a kid and also involves skills that I have built up over the past 10 years. The idea came naturally.

So anyway. Feel free to steal my idea

Barely know how to code. I'm very rusty. Always worked as non technical manager in IT sector. Found a niche in crypto and I also do very little technical work. Don't give up if you can't code, don't limit yourself.

flamming_python wrote:
If English is your native language you'll have a substantial advantage, as it will take you a fraction of the time to get through a book than it would for a Russian programmer (only the highest-profile books have been translated into Russian). Main thing is to be ready to put in the hours regardless, read and practice.

Yeah completely agree. Native English speakers do have a huge advantage. In our part of the world English is hardly spoken. I picked up English in the UK since I had to travel their for work, regularly. Though my English is quite mediocre.

flamming_python wrote:Once your interests and hobbies start developing, and you become a specialist in your work field too, you start to see other problems in life from new angles. If you're a programmer or another type of engineer, you start finding technical opportunities and ways to improve things.

Yeah what you said is very true. Had huge interest in the defence industry. Still have. Wanted to start a startup. But realized I don't have the engineering skills to design weapons even if it's something relatively simple like a drone that carries out ISR.

Obviously engineers can be hired but they come at a premium. Not something that startups can afford.

GarryB wrote:He can't code to save his own life but he knows enough about computers to get jobs for a group of people and he gets a percentage of their wages.

Interesting. I wonder what he knows about computers that is so very valuable.

Regular wrote:Barely know how to code. I'm very rusty. Always worked as non technical manager in IT sector. Found a niche in crypto and I also do very little technical work. Don't give up if you can't code, don't limit yourself.

Sure makes sense. Coding is difficult if you come from a non maths background (like I do). Though I do try some coding but it will take long and arduous years of preparation to become proficient. In the meantime hoping to develop some non coding skills for which there is demand in the market.

However, most of the best methodologies, coding techniques and such innovations are all written down in English and were created in Western countries, and all the best books are in English.

I dont wish to intrude into this great conversation, but i just need to ask, why is Russia not putting efforts to publish educational books (coding included) in Russian? The governments of the English world is at an undeclared war against Russia, why patronize them? Russia needs to create its own alternative to everything western to ensure its own cultural and national survival.

PhSt wrote:

However, most of the best methodologies, coding techniques and such innovations are all written down in English and were created in Western countries, and all the best books are in English.

I dont wish to intrude into this great conversation, but i just need to ask, why is Russia not putting efforts to publish educational books (coding included) in Russian? The governments of the English world is at an undeclared war against Russia, why patronize them? Russia needs to create its own alternative to everything western to ensure its own cultural and national survival.

Russian software engineering is not crap by any measure. Maybe it has declined over time, but in the past most Russian programmers
knew what an algorithm was and had a solid mathematical education. Just because western corporations love low bid hacks does not
mean that those hacks are not hacks.

Interesting. I wonder what he knows about computers that is so very valuable.

He knows a little about computers... what is valuable is that he understands the language... the computer terms, but he has excellent social skills... it means he can talk to IT people in a company and understand them, but more importantly he can talk to the managers and other people in the business, because they control the money and the contracts and he has better communication with them than they probably have with their own IT team.

When he goes to places he talks to everyone... he might find a good coder at one company whose contract is ending, so he will talk to his boss to see whether he is any good and if he is he will talk to him and get his contact details and add him to his list of good reliable competent computer people. As part of that list he will record what hardware and software and languages each IT guy on his books is familiar with and then when he talks to CEOs and businesses about the upgrades and hardware and software they use and what new upgrades they need he can flick through his list and sort out a work force.

What can happen is that a big company takes over a small company... which means the small company needs a complete system overhaul and transfer to make it compatible and part of the big companies systems... you might migrate the data as is, or it might need conversion to different formats and of course the existing hardware could just run the software of the big company or they might need to change everything.

Hell, they might even find the small companys' setup is best and migrate the big company onto their system... and of course there is the retraining of the big or small or big and small companies on the new system and/or new software.

Sometimes a big company might take the opportunity of change to upgrade its own hardware and software, or just reevaluate the data they collect and use...

jhelb wrote:

GarryB wrote:He can't code to save his own life but he knows enough about computers to get jobs for a group of people and he gets a percentage of their wages.

Interesting. I wonder what he knows about computers that is so very valuable.

Probably just enough to work out what contract is lucrative and what isn't.

But it's not about that. The guy had people skills, he saw an opportunity, and he took the initiative.

He had people skills in an industry where a lot of people on both sides... employer and employee don't.

If you have ever seen "the IT crowd", which is a british comedy about an IT department... a woman goes for a job in some company and is asked if she knows anything about computers. She replies, yes... keyboards, monitors, mouses... yes she knows all about computers... (ie she clearly knows nothing about computers), and is immediately give the job of IT manager and is send down to the basement where the IT department is. The two computer nerds quickly realise she knows nothing about computers, but when they go up to the manager together to get her fired the manager is in the process of firing person after person and eventually an entire floor of people for not working as a team... he also fires security for not working as a team to fire all the people he just fired. So they decide now is not a good time to ask for a new IT manager.

In the rest of the series however it turns out her people skills with the rest of the company make her a good IT manager because both computer nerds have disfunctional or non existent social skills anyway.

Obviously not a documentary, but I know a lot of computer people who have no time for people who don't understand the jargon and think they are inferior, and the vast majority of people I know don't really understand computers no matter what they write on their CVs.

I have an accountant friend with the words confident with computers on his CV who passed me his laptop with two folders open asking me how to copy a file in one folder to the the folder sitting next to it... ie right click in the open window the file and choose copy and right click in the open window next to it and choose paste sort of complex procedure... You would be surprised how many people in business can do what they do every day on a computer but really don't understand what they are doing and don't care. The have a fixed little path of what they use and which choices they select and never deviate because they will get lost.

When they use email, if someone closes a window showing their email boxes they really don't know how to get them back.

Obviously with the new gen this is less of a problem... I am talking about people 50 and over who might have had some computers in schools but most teachers didn't know how to use them anyway.

GarryB wrote:He had people skills in an industry where a lot of people on both sides... employer and employee don't.

If you have ever seen "the IT crowd", which is a british comedy about an IT department... a woman goes for a job in some company and is asked if she knows anything about computers. She replies, yes... keyboards, monitors, mouses... yes she knows all about computers... (ie she clearly knows nothing about computers), and is immediately give the job of IT manager and is send down to the basement where the IT department is. The two computer nerds quickly realise she knows nothing about computers, but when they go up to the manager together to get her fired the manager is in the process of firing person after person and eventually an entire floor of people for not working as a team... he also fires security for not working as a team to fire all the people he just fired. So they decide now is not a good time to ask for a new IT manager.

In the rest of the series however it turns out her people skills with the rest of the company make her a good IT manager because both computer nerds have disfunctional or non existent social skills anyway.

Obviously not a documentary, but I know a lot of computer people who have no time for people who don't understand the jargon and think they are inferior, and the vast majority of people I know don't really understand computers no matter what they write on their CVs.

I have an accountant friend with the words confident with computers on his CV who passed me his laptop with two folders open asking me how to copy a file in one folder to the the folder sitting next to it... ie right click in the open window the file and choose copy and right click in the open window next to it and choose paste sort of complex procedure... You would be surprised how many people in business can do what they do every day on a computer but really don't understand what they are doing and don't care. The have a fixed little path of what they use and which choices they select and never deviate because they will get lost.

When they use email, if someone closes a window showing their email boxes they really don't know how to get them back.

Obviously with the new gen this is less of a problem... I am talking about people 50 and over who might have had some computers in schools but most teachers didn't know how to use them anyway.

It is really bad in the government sector. The IT clowns on the software side come up with all sorts of pretexts to endlessly
meddle with, for example, model code and invoke the distorted term "support" when talking about leaving some version of the
model libraries on disk. BTW, this is not even code they develop. As a result of the make work nonsense from the "computer support"
people, people who do the important work have to endlessly waste their time on porting to new model versions (not a universally
justified activity for research) and dealing with revision brain farts that don't even conform to a proper version control system
(i.e. code of a certain revision is modified without changing the revision number). And the cherry on top of the IT turd cake is
their incessant need to apply every freaking patch to the operating system on the big iron HPC system. These loons actually
disrupt productivity of others with their precious "work" and they have out of control attitude issues like they are some sort
of royalty dealing with peasants.

I did big iron sys admin work while doing research in graduate school (Canada is a very Scroogy country) and do not find that this is
anything other than low level technician activity. At one stage I pointed out that system stability is paramount for research work
and that the "if it ain't broke, then don't fix it" philosophy should be applied to system updates, but they could not grasp the
concept and refused to believe that a system could be frozen in a functional state (*). Them lording over people who work on a
much higher level is a sign of their own inadequacy.

(*) I am not talking about security updates since these HPC systems are never directly attached to the internet. And it was the
IT clowns themselves that in the past willfully established a back door into the system that a hacker exploited.

flamming_python wrote:Or you can create your own successful business.

If a person starts a business in Russia and it becomes successful, in all likelihood he will be bumped off by someone close to the powers that be so that his business can be taken away.

There are only 4 jobs those days, unfortunately. Coding, showbiz, professional sports, prostitution (female exclusive). Pick the one you think you can service best.

Whereas in the west a bigger company doing the same thing as your new successful company will just buy you out or undersell you in your market and crush you.

It is no accident that coca cola is so wide spread... it takes over bottling plants around the world and absorbs local successes.

7up, sprite, and L&P are all lemonade drinks... there are of course a lot more and all are sold by the cocacola company... you think you are buying a local recognised drink but it is all owned and produced by one company.