[deedub]

All these comments about "no value" are hilarious. Honestly I dont think "serious programming" even matters. It's people learning, for example, that the 30 min daily process they do in excel can actually be a script that takes one second to run. The company is already seeing benefits to the culture and soon people will be thinking differently. That's a win.

[MSM]

I think that's equivalent to asking everyone to go to chef's school and describing the upside as 'People will realize that peeling potatoes can be done in a quarter the time they're doing it now!'

It's just... why? These people aren't going to be doing any programming daily. Why don't you take all that money, and all that time and let each non-programmer go to a deep dive conference of their choice for whatever their discipline is. Seems like a much better use of resources.

[deedub]

MSM, I know it can be hard to see for many people but sometimes diving deeper into your box is the wrong approach. Your example is perfect. Someone went and took classes that were a "waste of time" and ended up 75% more efficient because they looked at something from a different view...even though they didn't become a chef. This is exactly how people need to be leading their companies.

[tikhonj]

If you do a lot of cooking, it would be a great deal!

These people may not be doing much programming daily, granted. But programming is just the means, not the end: the end is to work with information. And everyone in an office setting works with information. Becoming even a little more efficient with large amounts of information is a great benefit, and only requires a tiny bit of programming aptitude.

You can think of it like learning to touch-type: invaluable even if you only do typing tangentially to your real job.