[rahimnathwani]

I accept your points about limiting the surface area, but it applies more to tech companies than it does to other types of companies. For many (maybe most?) companies, their proprietary code is barely useful enough for its intended purpose within the context of that company's operations, and would be less than useful to a competitor.

"Who reviews code who has never written code?"

I'm not talking about reviewing code as in 'code review', but reading code to understand what it's doing.

And I didn't talk about anyone who has 'never written code', but someone who has never written production code. The article also wasn't talking about people who have never written code; if you do a Udemy coding course, you'll write at least some code.

I worked at a place a few years ago that had some popular consumer tech products. I was using one of them, and experienced what I thought was a strange error message. I was able to search the code base for the error message, and read the ~20 lines of code before it, to understand how it was triggered. I was then able to file a very specific bug about what I thought was wrong with the logic. I didn't need to be a SWE, tech lead or engineer manager to do that. I didn't learn to code using Udemy courses, but someone who did could have done the same thing in the same situation.