[wobblybubble]

> Programming is the new literacy. People who can do it are on a different plane to people who can't.

This is what I believe sometimes.

Then I look at all the pitfalls of shell scripts and how the time investments on automation tasks just balloon… then not so much. :)

But if people have a different experience with that then I don’t doubt it.

[AussieWog93]

YMMV, but I'm 100% in agreement with GP about programming being the new literacy. I quit my old SWE job to run a bloody eBay store and am raking it in because I'm competing against people who can't program.

The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the problem but getting people with domain expertise literate enough to write some hacky Python scripts.

This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms of productivity.

[lordnacho]

This is exactly right. People who are actual programmers are like poets, essayists, or authors in the original literacy. They have a title that actually says "person is literate".

But there were always great poets and authors. The big win was that you got a bureaucrat class with their own domain titles who could use writing to get things done.

Likewise if the boss in the original article had been taught how to hack some scripts together, they wouldn't need to hire the author for $90k.

[rustyboy]

I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success.

Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.

We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.

[smw]

And here's the promise of 'serverless' function as a service type stuff. Pay a few cents a second, have security/ha etc.

[a1369209993]

As anyone who has read random fanfiction.net stories or middle school penmanship homework can attest, being able to write is not that same thing as being able to write well.

[wobblybubble]

I’m probably just bad at it.