Is it necessary to study programming for competent investment?

Question

Project management

At the moment, I have launched one project not in the IT field, which allows you to earn a living with minimal time costs. Cons - seasonality of income, increasing competition and a correspondingly decreasing "margin". Pluses - the possibility of expanding the business, shifting all work to hired employees. At the moment, I am considering newer and highly specialized areas of business (as areas with higher potential earnings), in particular the IT sector. Do you think it is necessary to start studying programming to understand the essence of the sphere, ways to make a profit and the subsequent competent selection of employees, setting goals and objectives, etc.? If necessary, where do you start?
From a business point of view, I sometimes see areas where some kind of IT product is needed, for which I myself would give money if it existed. But to develop into a field in which I don’t understand is somehow scary, but there are no good specialists who would help, and if there are, it’s not a fact that they are competent ...
The city is an administrative center, 300 thousand people. Studied Pascal at school.

Answer 1

You need to learn not programming, but the process of creating a product. There are several models of the product creation process - classics (Waterfall, RUP), Agile technologies (Scrum, Canban, XP) - you will find on Wikipedia. There are a huge number of books written about the development process, and some of them are absolutely necessary to read if you want to have an idea of ​​​​how software development works.
In addition, it will be good to get acquainted with modern trends in software development, and this can only be done by following trendsetters blogs. It will also allow you to speak the same language with the people you hire (often they try to impress the employer with the knowledge of new fashionable technologies - do not be fooled, fashion and solving business problems are slightly different things, and often terrible decisions become fashionable, like node.js).
It will be very useful to start rotating in the IT business community and make acquaintances there.

Answer 2

I would say that you need to know specific technologies, for example, they tell you the site will be made in python or in php, what will you answer? CMS or framework? On Yii or Symphony? You do not need to know all these technologies in detail, but you need to know exactly how the use of each will turn out in the future. And it is better to have a technical director, only he should be a close friend and not a freelancer in another city.

Answer 3

completely unrelated things.

Answer 4

What is needed is not the ability to program, but erudition in the field of Internet technologies.
Either study on your own or hire an information technology specialist.
Questions to be answered:
- Are there solutions to the problem you are interested in?
- what's the difference if there are several?
- what are the disadvantages of existing solutions?
- is it possible to eliminate the shortcomings when developing a solution on your own?
and a dozen more
And then the focus shifts to development
- what kind of language does the existing solution have, if it can be improved?
- what kind of language does the analogue have and why is this particular language chosen?
- who will finalize or write their decision?
- in what language to write your decision?
and other technical details

Answer 5

No.
But useful. As a rule, this knowledge allows you to save a lot.
But it will take more than one year to study it at this level.