Just Because I Don’t Code Doesn’t Mean I Don’t Understand Your Bullsh*t

Yes, I read the logs. No, I don’t want to write your unit tests.

Let’s get one thing straight:
Just because I don’t spend my days lovingly handcrafting functions in a dark room lit only by VS Code and regret…
…doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on.

If you’re a QA, business system, analyst, sysadmin, support, or “somehow the person who always knows where things are broken”, this one’s for you.

👨‍🔧 Technical ≠ Developer

Look, I get it. Somewhere along the line, “technical” became synonymous with “developer.”
And if you’re not committing code, some folks assume you’re just there to “support” the real work.

Spoiler alert:

That CI/CD pipeline you rage-configured at 2am?

That incident you diagnosed while everyone else was still googling “what is a port?”

That API response you sniffed out like a bloodhound with Postman?

Yeah. That’s technical.

You may not be pushing code, but you are absolutely pulling weight.

💬 I Don’t Need to Code to Smell the BS

Let’s break down a few common phrases and what they actually mean:

Dev: “It works on my machine.”
You: "Cool. Let’s deploy your machine to production then."

Dev: “The data looks fine to me.”
You: “Did you test it with actual data or just lorem ipsum and good intentions?”

Dev: “That’s an edge case.”
You: “You mean the thing that happens every Friday after 3pm? Yeah, let’s maybe not ignore that.”

You’ve been around long enough to know that buzzwords can’t fix broken systems.
You’ve debugged your way through half-baked handoffs, ambiguous Jira tickets, and meetings that felt like escape rooms with no clues.

🔍 You See the Whole Board

Here’s your actual superpower:
You don’t just know your job. You know how everyone else’s half-assed version of theirs affects yours.

You see the weird dependency.
You notice when someone pushes straight to main with no tests.
You catch the mismatch between “what the client asked for” and “what’s getting built.”

You’re the connective tissue.
The context keeper.
The reason the entire org hasn’t burned down (yet).

🎯 So What Now?

You don’t need permission to be confident in what you know.
You don’t need to learn React just to prove you belong.
You don’t need to say “I’m not that technical” when you’ve been reverse-engineering dev behavior for years.

Start owning your expertise out loud.
Start pushing back when things don’t add up.
Start documenting your wins, your insights, your impact.

And if someone asks you if you really understand what the dev team is doing?
Just smile and say:

“Better than they do.”