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by cudgy 1162 days ago
> I honestly believe everyone working at a tech company should know or learn how to code even if it's just SQL or basic Python.

Why? They should already know the native language like English in the US, which is perfectly capable of describing a problem. Unfortunately, many people are poor at communicating in the native language, which is a more fundamental problem. However, how does learning another language like Python or SQL make this any better, if they are unable to use their native language sufficiently?

1 comments

While I agree that English or any other spoken language is sufficient to describe technical requirements, many people have trouble communicating what they actually want because the language itself is very forgiving and so there is room for misinterpretation.

At least with a programming language, which is more precis e and limited and what you can express, you are forced to think more precisely the desired logic.

I've taught and gave workshops to business people on programming and database query languages for data analysis include non-SQL ones like Mongo. And I can say that those that took to time to learn the query language communicated more effectively because they can send over a query and then use English to give more context, mostly around the presentation layer.