Hey all,

Thank you all in advance!

I just graduated college with a degree in computer science/cybersecurity I just got a consulting job in a technology-adjacent area (data analyst but little coding unfortunately), I’m paid decently, and I’m in the Bay Area which has been quite nice. The job market was incredibly tough despite many years of building my start-up + internships.

I’ve co-founded a SaaS start up for a few years, 6-8k MRR and ~300 users. I spend several hours a day working. I helped build it early on, contributed to some of the code, but since our team is engineer heavy I’ve moved to product and marketing because there was an immediate need. That said, though things are going well and we are seeing some growth, I will stay in my role and dabble in the technical aspects of the company.

I do feel FOMO from my developer friends because I’ve always enjoyed coding (I hated my classes in college, but picking up bug fixes and working on side projects is incredibly fun to me), but I’m just not in that space… both in my job and my start up. It comes from me just dedicated to building and perhaps not fully applying myself to programming.

My question to you all is: even if I’m not the best programmer… would you recommend I cut some time away from building my company or other hobbies, to brushing up on my coding knowledge everyday? I could try to kill two birds with one stone, build, and learn, but there’s some concepts I really need to revisit independent of our code-base. I just feel guilty taking the time away from my already busy schedule. Maybe I should I find a new job more aligned to programming – even then I’d need to up my skills? I may be dramatizing, but I feel like I’ve taken a few missteps and have been blinded by just wanting to grow my start-up without regarding my future beyond it.

Thanks again :)

TLDR; I co-founded a start-up, neglected my growth as a programmer, looking for insights on whether to stay as jack of all trades or code as much as I can?