[faizshah]

I just want to add to this, I had this exact same experience when working with journalists and other non-technical background programmers.

You’ll find everyone from philosophy PhDs to Biologists to Journalists who use pandas because its so easy to learn it and work with it. It’s amazing how you can become productive in python/pandas without any experience or even basic understanding of programming because of how accessible jupyter, colab and blogs/docs on pandas are.

The other thing people don’t talk about is that a lot of these organizations can hire a CS student part time or a full time software engineer/data engineer/data scientist who can optimize their scripts once they are written. Pretty much any software engineer can read and debug python code without needing to learn python. So for example, I know some engineers working in genomics who have turned biologist-written scripts that take several days to run in python into scripts that take hours or minutes to run by doing basic optimizations like removing quadratic algorithms from the script or applying pyspark or dask to add parallelism.

The fact that python can be used as a bridge between technical and non-technical people is amazing and I think it has provided a better bridge between these groups than SQL was ever able to provide.

[CE02]

I couldn’t agree more. And I must say, now that it’s being used as a bridge between technical and nontechnical talent it’s becoming ever more vital from a career perspective. Most people recognize the value of fundamental coding skills and if you’re even just above average at coding in a non-CS field, you seem magnitudes more valuable than you really are. In both industry and research, ears immediately perk up when they realize I have a background in economics but competencies in coding beyond the standard regressions in R that everyone does in econometrics. It’s hilarious because as mentioned prior, I’m rather pathetic compared to most people on this forum.