What I miss the most about writing code…

In college I wrote a lot of code. A lot a lot a lot of code. Especially Junior Fall semester when I was in these two classes where the students unexpectantly couldn’t finish the coursework and thus most were completing their final projects 2 months after the semester was over.

As a Program Manager, I don’t get to write code. (Except for the code I wrote in Office X for Mac – most of the dialogs have controls that lay themselves out via a mechanism called Dialog Auto Layout. And, in fact, there’s one dialog where I forgot to check in the changes and as a result it looked like ass. Fortunately, it’s a dialog that few ever see!)

I do miss writing code sometimes. In particular:

1. I miss hitting the build and run button. You can’t really do that with specifications or e-mails. There’s often no sense of accomplishment or completion as a Program Manager.

2. I miss listening to music. I found it rather helpful when I was writing code, but I find it distracting when I’m responding to e-mails, drawing up schedules, or writing specifications.

Go figure.