[Kon-Peki]

My experience is that most office workers are perfectly capable of writing software, especially if they have access to some basic training material and documentation.

However, most office workers would rather not write software and think that the whole pay-someone-else-to-do-it paradigm is great.

[jvanderbot]

What if we ignored division of labor and asked everyone to be mildly capable at everything? Well, that sounds terrible.

[Kon-Peki]

It sure does!

On the other hand, having some mild programming capability gives a lot of people a lot more agency in their job and is a good thing. It's just that once they've proved out their idea and it is ready to be a real thing, they are overwhelmingly going to prefer to hand it off to the "experts".

I think there is a lot of opportunity in a no-code product that believes that this is how it works. I've just not ever seen anything where the developers say "this is great, I can slide right in and keep going with this!". It's always "what a mess, we have to start from scratch!"

[jvanderbot]

I once knew of a person who needed to quickly come up with a report supporting a course of action some C-suite person wanted to do.

The report required access to some institutional financial data, which of course is "open" because this is a large non profit.

This clever person taught themselves enough code to ping the server for the data (read-only, of course). Note, this data is available to the business teams. The report was well done.

All hell broke loose organizationally, since they wanted strict access controls for security etc. The business team felt (perhaps justifiably) side-stepped (and perhaps unjustifiably threatened). Communications lines had been crossed! Access controls overcome! It was anarchy!

As a side note. Shame and ignorance-based access controls are a critical part of most orgs' fire-walling, I bet.

[MonaroVXR]

In my experience even IT people are not capable of doing that,sounds harsh but this is reality for me. IMHO.

[Larrikin]

I'd say many, not most, are capable of writing small scripts that save them time at work for small tasks.

It all falls apart when they try to turn it into software that does multiple things, has a GUI, is useful for anyone not using their specific machine setup a particular way, has error handling instead of checking the work output manually, etc.