[mitchellst]

Programming craft does not matter because programming craft has no content. Doctors treat and fix bodily ills; their actions— the uses of their craft— are determined by the state of the patient. Similarly, lawyers' craft is determined by the content of the law. (The results can be encouraging or horrifying depending on whether the laws that apply to your time, place, and situation are just ones.) What determines the content to which a programmer's craft is applied? If it does not make money or serve the public good that your nonprofit addresses, why should your firm support it?

I say this as a programmer who likes writing beautiful code. Nevertheless, when we look around, we see no equivalent of charity hospitals for coders, where philanthropists donate wings and endow chairs to advance the state of the craft. (Not to disparage what we do have: CS Departments, GitHub, some open source foundations are awesome, but do not reflect similar public standing.) Our craft is not valued on its own terms because the broader society does not believe it is inherently beneficial to them. In a day when facebook and twitter throw our elections open to tampering, uber does... whatever uber does, and everyone's even more addicted to Netflix than they were to TV, can you blame them?

Lawyers are valued because they make society freer and fairer. Doctors enhance human dignity by caring for those made weak by sickness. Do you have an equivalently positive outcome for what our profession does when left to its own devices? If not, it's rightly difficult to appeal to the pieties of your profession with someone who does not share that profession.

This isn't meant to be a rebuke, rather, a reminder that good skills are unhelpful unless put to good use. If you don't like money as a means of keeping score on that, there's plenty of work in the public and nonprofit sectors.