Taking data in one system or format that is already in a computer, and manually performing one of, or a combination ofm transformations, filtering, aggregating, moving to another system, etc.<p>Like I have gone through voter mailing data for a political candidate and filtered it, removed individuals who's addresses were outside the area or who hadn't voted in the last election, combined individuals with the same last name and the same address, then transformed it into a format suitable for address printing.<p>All that is pretty easy to do with code. If you wanted to go through several thousand by hand though in an unsorted list, that would be a pain. Businesses will have similar requirements... like taking sales data that is already entered and formatting it for a report.<p>Where non developers waste money is doing a repetitive time consuming rules based task on a computer without automating it.<p>Ancedotally, non developers also tend to undervalue their and their employee's time. If you are paying an employee to do a task, if it's not absolutely essential or doesn't have a ROI that's higher then money you are paying the employee per hour to handle it, it's time to consider how important that task is.<p>Finally, again ancedotally, non developers often won't invest in maintenance costs, and instead end up paying for time sensitive repairs or fixes, because they are easier to reason about. A coder is more likely to expect things to break, code to rot, etc. This can be in objects, services or in underpaying trained individuals so that their is a high turn over rate, where better pay might reduce that. Costco for example makes money despite it's higher pay because they have to train employees less. I think high pay also tends to reduce employee pilferage.