Your Next Tech Job Might Not Ask You to Code

No seriously, we mean it. And we’re not finagling a linguistic technicality by which, yes, people in HR and marketing also work at software companies. We’ll say it confidently and clearly: You can work a tech job — one in which you are using hard skills in technical tools — without ever needing to write a line of code.

Here’s what we mean.

Manual QA

Unless you printed out this article (in which case, we’re flattered), you’re reading it on a digital device. And the computer, phone, or tablet you’re looking at right now had to go through quality assurance (QA). That process made sure it functions properly, and, as you might suspect, it’s of crucial importance. 

In fact, you likely have already experienced the frustration that comes when QA is flubbed: Text on a site overlaps to make it unreadable. An app that works fine on your friend’s Android doesn’t work on your iPhone. You fill in all your info in a lengthy form and hit submit only to have the site reload and present you with newly-blank fields that you need to enter your data into again.

It’s the job of a QA analyst to prevent these things from happening. But QA comes in two flavors: manual and automated. Automation requires scripting knowledge (more on this later), but manual QA workers are still vital workers throughout the tech space_{Please Break the Software: The Importance of Quality Assurance}.

For example, you can’t write code that reports back on the subjective experience of using a piece of tech. Code can’t tell that it was hard to find something on an online store, and that, when you clicked “Add to cart” after struggling to find the thing you wanted, there was no feedback that the button had even worked.

This is the exact situation in which manual QA shines. It can go beyond just checking convenience or user-friendliness, too. Manual QA can also ensure products are accessible. This was one thing that animated TripleTen grad Jessica Powers_{Tying a Career Together with QA: Jessica Powers’s TripleTen Story} during her externship.

One of our smaller team projects was accessibility, and I immediately went, ‘I want to look at the captions,’ and one of my teammates went, ‘Well, I want to look at the visual contrast between the images.’

Jessica PowersTripleTen grad

And manual QA is just that — manual. Naturally, you need expertise in tools and techniques, but none of that involves coding.

A caveat: we still teach coding in our QA bootcamp

With all that said, if you look at our QA bootcamp site, you’ll see languages listed — SQL and Python specifically. These are some of the most intuitive ones to master. They’re both higher-level, meaning they mimic human languages. This makes them easier for people to understand, so with a little training, you can absolutely get a handle on them.

We do this to ensure our grads finish the bootcamp with the robust skill sets that maximize their chances of landing a new tech job. Will you absolutely need scripting skills if you choose to pursue a career in QA? Not if you go for a manual QA position. However, we’d be remiss in our duty of preparing people for careers in QA if we didn’t provide instruction in both manual QA and QA automation. (And you might just find automation is the approach you gravitate towards anyway — don’t knock it ‘til you try it!)

UX/UI design

User experience (UX)/user interface (UI) design is all about the feel and interactivity of sites, apps, and software in general. UI focuses on how things look and feel — are elements attractive to the eye and visually cohesive? Are they pleasing to interact with? Do the aesthetics and interactive elements combine to support the feeling that a company or brand is trying to put forth? 

If you want to see good UI in action, just check out any site or app designed by Apple. We bet you can picture how an Apple site will look even without navigating to it (and this also speaks to the consistency and power of their design language).

Intimately connected — and thus why these responsibilities are so often combined in one role — is UX. This is typically more focused on higher level design and the overall experience (hence the name). While UI is more specific about the visual and interactive elements, UX is more about the overarching structure — what’s the journey a user follows? How are users guided toward an ultimate goal? What problems do they encounter on their way to that finish line? How can those pain points be mitigated? And, in general, does the user enjoy their time following the path you have laid out for them?

Basically, if you like scheming up plans for how to make people enjoy their time — if you like planning parties or getting people together to do something fun — you’ll likely also enjoy UX/UI design. (It’s also a great field if you have a knack for creativity_{Why UX/UI Design Is the Career for Artists}).

And, as we promised, this field doesn’t ask you to know coding. While we do teach digital languages as part of our QA curriculum, our UX/UI Design bootcamp is code-free. We deemed it valuable to teach coding for QA specialists so we could ensure they’d have the greatest chances of landing the career leap, but when we looked at the market for UI/UX, we didn’t see the same pressures for programming knowledge. So if you’re convinced coding isn’t for you, check out UX/UI design.

Want to see if QA or UX/UI is for you?

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