I think you hit the nail on the head. With all of the resources that are currently available on the internet, it is easier than ever for a non-technical person to learn enough about programming for them to piece together a programatic solution to a wide variety of problems.<p>In an age where many people spend 40+ hours per week in front of a computer screen, even a small marginal increase in a computer user's productivity could save them hundreds of hours a year. As a result, it seems like a completely reasonable investment of a non-technical person's time and energy to learn enough about programming to enable them to scrap together a program that allows them to accomplish simple tasks more efficiently.<p>Would a professional programmer be able to write better code more quickly? Of course. But would a person with zero programming knowledge even recognize when a particular task they are spending hundreds of hours each year manually performing could easily be automated? Probably not.
This should be a mandatory read for every business guy who wants to run his or her own start-up. I wish I could have read this post three years ago. I still look back in horror on how I interacted with coders or with my technical co-founder before I started to learn to code myself.<p>I guess the bottom line to the whole discussion started by Jeff is:
Not everyone should become a coder, not everyone can become a (good) coder, and not everyone wants to become a coder. But if you really feel like learning to code is the only way not to get left behind in this rapidly changing world (vs just doing it becomes everybody thinks it's cool nowadays), go for it!
This is probably the best of the recent 'don't/do code' blog posts. You don't need to be a guru but over time you can learn enough to get by and understand code.<p>If you are building a serious business, eventually you will need to hand over the real development work, to real developers. This allows you time to do what you're good at.
Agreed. Marketing dude here (who uses mixrank btw) that learned to hack a little bit. Good for my life, and good for talking to programmers about programming. I'm not a programmer, but I think my life is better for having hacked some things together. It has certainly helped me appreciate the challenges of developing great software.
That list of lessons learned? That's why everyone should learn to code, or at least try, if for no other reason than so they know what it's like on our end. And hey, it might be directly useful, too.
Every CEO and executive should experience a bit of this.. there is soo much productivity waiting to be unlocked if only c-suite could 'get' IT. Sigh ...
Radical notion: Some people should learn to code. Some shouldn't. Not everyone should be a programmer. Some people need to program even though they are bad programmers (e.g.: a business guy stringing together off the shelf services with a little bit of glue code to make an MVP to attract an engineer cofounder.)<p>If you have the internal drive to be a programmer- great, be one. If the idea repulses you, then do something else.<p>I don't really think there is all that much peer pressure for everyone to be a programmer.<p>In the past, however, there was. Back In The Day, "computer literacy" meant programming because computers often came with little more than a basic interpreter out of the box. This is no longer the case.<p>I think all these tools that let "non-programmers" learn to code are great-- because there's a lot of "non-programmers" who could benefit from it. For instance, ops people aren't necessarily "programmers" but they can use scripts to automate tasks that would be mundane and repetitive otherwise.<p>If an assistant wants to learn a macro language so that they can better operate spreadsheets-- wonderful.<p>I worked thru one of the online programming classes with a non-programming co-founder and I think she found it pretty valuable. She's not writing code now, but her understanding of what's going on with the product is much better.<p>I think its silly to pretend like everyone has the same level of programming skill (which was a hard lesson for me to learn, because it always seemed so easy for me, and I figured t would be for other people.) But its also silly to poo-poo on "non-programmers" wanting to learn some programming.<p>These tools are great. And this drama seems, well, also silly.<p>I'm a programmer. I would think any article saying "Everyone should learn marketing!" is silly, but I'd also think that "nobody should learn marketing except marketers" is also silly. I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing and learning everything I can-- because its something we need.