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It sounds like you're in the extreme wild west doing whatever you want and learning money skills in the process. This is an ideal setup for a self learner like you I think - if you were in a company with experienced engineers they wouldn't let you experiment like that and you might end up learning much less quickly. Definitely stick around there for a while and learn as much as possible
That said you can't stay in a place like this too long man. You are still at a fraction of your potential and somehow the most knowledgeable person there that's crazy -
@ArtOfBBQ I work there since almost 15 years, the coding part is not even my main gig but is in my job description under "additional tasks". Pay is good, hours are good, social is very good, Id be a fool to part ways.
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Well, you can't really expect programming knowledge from literally everyone who doesn't code.
Mathematicians and engineers are our neighbours.
But management is so far away, you can't even see them on the horizon with a clear sky.
You can maybe get them to accept that it will not be done in an hour.
But they will never get, why some barely visible things take weeks. And why some huge visual changes are sometimes done in minutes.
Maybe, you can get them on the mindset, that software development isn't like production but more like research.
And never forget, that coding scales worse than pregnancy: When one coder writes some piece of software in nine days, nine coders will maybe do it in twelve... -
Whenever I need a task accepted by someone non-technical I spend an hour or two preparing analogies that a 6 year old would understand, e.g. when I talk about incompatible protocols: "imagine a German who doesn't speak Chinese writing a letter to a Chinese who doesn't speak German - I literally have to teach them both a common tongue". Usually works but your analogies must be consistent over time and make sense.
TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.
So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.
In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...
I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.
Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.
Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.
rant
long story
clueless managers
long rant