Exactly. Even jobs that could be done in earlier times with just pen and paper, tend to require something similar to software to do effiently now.
A domain expert that has even BASIC coding skills can actually by much more useful than one who has none at all, if there exist programming-like environments that enable them to make use of such skills.
Let's say you have two experts in some business domain, and they need to provide input to some data pipeline process.
If one of them can express their input in a format that can actually do the computation needed, let's say in Jupyter or in an ETL tool like Pentaho, you can find ways to operationalize that with low latency using only 1-2 developers even for a large number of such experts.
If the other will only produce requirements in Confluence or Office, and the developers need to decode these requirements and turn them into working code, there are a lot more ways things can go wrong. Often, this requires multiple iterations to iron misunderstandings. This workflow can easily add a need for one extra developer PER domain expert to do the same job, and also take longer to get into production.
In other words, the value generated by the first expert may easily be the same as that of from second expert PLUS the value from one developer, or even more when taking into account that more employees need more managers, more meetings, etc.
Now, what sometimes happens in organizations, is that the first domain expert is not recognized as a super-valuable domain expert, but is instead treated as a below average developer. They may even have such a title, even if in many cases (at least in my experience) their education may be something like economics or marketing, or they may be self-taught.
But when that person leaves, the organization first fills up the role with a new dev, but quickly hits the wall because there are nobody left that understands the business side.
And as the new junior employee spends all of their energy to understand the modern tech stack that most of the Cool Devs are using, managment discovers that the second domain expert suddenly is a bottleneck, while the productivity of the organization has gone down by half or more.
A domain expert that has even BASIC coding skills can actually by much more useful than one who has none at all, if there exist programming-like environments that enable them to make use of such skills.
Let's say you have two experts in some business domain, and they need to provide input to some data pipeline process.
If one of them can express their input in a format that can actually do the computation needed, let's say in Jupyter or in an ETL tool like Pentaho, you can find ways to operationalize that with low latency using only 1-2 developers even for a large number of such experts.
If the other will only produce requirements in Confluence or Office, and the developers need to decode these requirements and turn them into working code, there are a lot more ways things can go wrong. Often, this requires multiple iterations to iron misunderstandings. This workflow can easily add a need for one extra developer PER domain expert to do the same job, and also take longer to get into production.
In other words, the value generated by the first expert may easily be the same as that of from second expert PLUS the value from one developer, or even more when taking into account that more employees need more managers, more meetings, etc.
Now, what sometimes happens in organizations, is that the first domain expert is not recognized as a super-valuable domain expert, but is instead treated as a below average developer. They may even have such a title, even if in many cases (at least in my experience) their education may be something like economics or marketing, or they may be self-taught.
But when that person leaves, the organization first fills up the role with a new dev, but quickly hits the wall because there are nobody left that understands the business side.
And as the new junior employee spends all of their energy to understand the modern tech stack that most of the Cool Devs are using, managment discovers that the second domain expert suddenly is a bottleneck, while the productivity of the organization has gone down by half or more.