[tlrobinson]

Certainly I wouldn't expect most of them to be writing production code, but there are other benefits.

1) Before I knew how to program computers and programming seemed very mysterious and magical to me. Giving everyone a basic understanding of what your company actually does is a good thing. At the very least it will improve communication. It might help non-developers set more realistic expectations, etc.

2) Even "business types" can benefit from knowing how to program, even if they won't be writing user-facing code. Many business applications have scripting engines built in. Being able to take some data and transform it or calculate some statistics will help them do their jobs better.

3) Designers/UI/UX people who can program are incredibly valuable. They know what the technology is capable of, and will design with that in mind. Often they can produce working prototypes, or even production code.

Some employees will probably just learn the basics and decide they don't really care for programming, but others might embrace it and become much more efficient at what they do.