I got out of programming as a necessity and in to doing things for the love of it. Teaching, evangelizing, helping people out, mostly. For me, programming was/is a means to an end, not something I enjoyed doing.. but helping other people to learn and enjoy programming is something I enjoy. (As an aside, I can now sympathize with those professors who teach subjects without having any commercial experience of them. It helps, but I don't think it's a prerequisite to being a good educator.)
How did you transition? Do you hire programmers now to build stuff, instead of doing it yourself? Or is the nature of your business just much more content/marketing oriented now, so you don't need much (new) technology?
While I'm not a fan of grinding on code for hours anymore, I still code a little but for the ends rather than the means. I've become content and outcome focused rather than code and technology focused, so I can "outsource" to existing technologies/apps (e.g. a Wordpress install that does 90% of what I want, rather than a custom CMS that does it all).
I've looked into outsourcing to other people but find myself too much of a micromanager to get away with it. No-one deserves micromanagement so I avoid it. Everyone else seems to want to turn trivial tasks into big "projects" with budgets to match ;-) - but that's because they're professional coders with standards, whereas if I can use an off the shelf product or bash something messy together in Ruby in 2 hours, I'll do that instead.
Professional coders tend to gasp in horror at my philosophy and I can't blame them. I'm very much of the "duct tape" mentality when it comes to engineering. Thankfully, you can get away with this on your own non-critical projects.. (it's a bit like the welder who doesn't use a mask when doing his own stuff in the garage) but I don't advise it for career programmers because otherwise you'll end up on The Daily WTF every week ;-)
Thanks for your insightful answer, Peter. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to wear far more hats than what their strengths and/or preferences are. As you've said, I think one luxury of a level of success is to "retire" to one's preferred areas.
Side note: Having to do significant work in one's areas of weakness/aversion is what makes the initial phases of starting up disproportionately challenging.
