To develop = to code, right?

“You code all day long”

I have mixed feelings about programming languages. Non-IT or non-developer people tend towards thinking a dev job is all about programming. And that programming language X is better than Y for R1 or R2 reason (or FA or FB framework). In my own experience, they are mostly wrong. My job includes, in a non-exhaustive fashion, several different actions:

• to communicate: about everything (feature, bug, infrastructure, UI, UX, design) with everyone (product owner, manager, dev, architect, designer, ops) with every tool (real contact, phone, chat, email, document)
• to design: a system, an architecture, an API, some interactions (usually it requires some people standing in front of a whiteboard)
• to implement: development (in X or Y language), testing, deployment, configuration, review
• to “bureaucrate”, e.g.: budget/holidays reporting for management, JIRA/Trello/Aptana/board updates, ticket to ask for a new database

From a wider sight

I see the same conflation in the french public education, our (so-called) specialists say:

Kids should learn at school coding/how to program.

I am confused. I think kids should really see the whole picture and grow a digital culture, by learning and understanding our digital world in its countless fields: privacy, security, cloud, GAFAM, banking, internet, networks, social media…

For those who say:

These bunch of developers, they just have “to shit code”.

I would moderate this previous statement: they communicate, design, implement and bureaucrate.

As a developer, I try to change people’s minds about this perception of a “task performer” and promote developers’ more diverse skills set.