On the first day of my first job out of college, the sales engineer of the company took me out to lunch to give me some career advice. He said the best thing he ever did for his career was not learning how to code. Apparently he had graduated as a CS major and went straight for a software company, but really just could not program. Of course, as he put it he chose not to program, but I ultimately saw some of his work and it was beyond terrible.

Instead, he made sure never to actually be useful to the programming or hardware teams, but talk to them just enough to know the basics and keep updated. Since he wasn't actually ever working on anything, he used his free time to mingle with management and used his inside knowledge from the programming teams to announce potential problems to management before the actual programming teams could communicate this info.

Sure enough, he slowly moved into management and higher salary brackets by never actually learning how to program. Of course, the programmers and hardware teams caught on to his game and cut him off from any useful information, and without any actually knowledge he hit a ceiling within the company pretty quickly. Still, it was an important business lesson for me, and ever since watching this all take place I've made sure to carve out some time from my heads-down work to maintain visibility and directly communicate with management.