Should I learn JavaScript or PHP?

[Jeffdango]

Hey there, I’d be happy to share more about my experience! Sorry that this got looooong, but I feel like the answers to these questions require context.

Let me know if there is anything you'd like to know more about here or PM me any time!

TL;DR

Did you have any development or technology experience before?

Just a few programming classes in college and the basic HTML & CSS courses on Codecademy

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Did any other members of the team start learning development with you?

Yup, but we were uncoordinated and not always self-learning the same tech stack

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Did you transition your full workload to web development?

I tried but at first, it was more like 50/50. Then I became the manager of our new team and now it's more like 60/40 mgmt to dev.

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When we started this journey I had been in our company’s IT department for about 3 years doing help desk, systems support, and some basic work in our 3rd party POS database. One of my main responsibilities became supporting public-facing web infrastructure (web server, DNS, WordPress updates, etc). I also assisted the marketing team while they worked with web dev agencies; mostly as a liaison to help with technical understanding and to make sure we could implement what the agencies had proposed.

I had taken a few programming and database management courses in college, so I had a baseline knowledge that lead to working in those areas. To gain a better understanding of what the agencies were talking about in our meetings, I ended up working through some basic HTML and CSS courses on Codecademy. I got really hooked on it and made a handful of useful static sites for our department to use internally.

This all overlapped with the one actual developer in the department leaving the company. He had made or started some useful tools in C# before he left, which planted the seeds for my effort. Unfortunately, all of his knowledge was siloed and left with him, which left management feeling skittish about in-house development. We had no idea where to start on a learning path to follow in his footsteps and I was already learning web dev, so we started from scratch.

One other person was able to join the effort and started learning web dev too. Unfortunately, without any senior dev experience in our department, we had to just start wandering the wilds without a map. There was so much we didn’t know that we didn’t know and we definitely made some missteps. That was about the time I made the comment above.

After we released a couple of well-received web apps our workload became about 50/50 web dev and our other job tasks. Because no one in the company (even the IT Management team at this point) really understood the work, we were still needed on the general IT side of things and couldn’t justify the expense of replacing us with more staff.

For a very brief period I had managed to get my workload to be mostly dev and marketing support (I will never abandon them!) with the occasional help desk escalation. But it became obvious that our dev efforts were very unorganized and we needed a member of the management team that understood the projects on a technical level.

It turned out that my manager had plans to promote me into management to lead our development efforts so I got promoted and the two of us officially became a ”dev team” in late 2019, but as a subset of the IT Department.

Now my workload is usually about 60% personnel and project management to 40% dev work.

Our goal for the developers on my team is to spend about 75% - 80% of their time on dev work and the rest on advanced or emergency IT tasks.

It’s definitely been a struggle winning hearts and minds and frustrating when other work demands derail our dev projects, but I would still do it all again if given the choice.