Knowing how to code is a really useful skill for anybody in business. For an entrepreneur, it means you can validate your high-tech startup idea without having to out and recruit a CTO or spend a lot of money on an external software development shop. But even if you’re running a pizza place, a little bit of coding experience can save you a lot of time when you’re playing with Excel spreadsheets late at night trying to figure out how much money all that fancy pepperoni is costing you. Most people are in the middle. I have a lot of friends who went into management consulting – the ones who know how to write little bits of software to help them do their jobs tend to get a lot more sleep at night.
The other reason to learn programming – even a little bit of programming – is that it makes the whole process of interacting with technology a lot less scary. Computers are black boxes, and people don’t trust black boxes.
Having written that, I suppose I should consider the opposite extreme. Just because you can write simple programs after half an hour of interactive lessons doesn’t mean that software development is either easy or low-value. It’s not. A top-tier software engineer took thousands of hours to get that way.