Eh, lots of people end up using information systems incidentally to what their main task is. I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day.
As more people start using datasets in some capacity for their "real jobs", being able to automate things becomes increasingly important. The amount of insane labor going on using Office boggles my mind. Knowing coding will at least get people to say "wait, there's gotta be a better way" even if they can't accomplish it themselves. Not to mention the cognitive benefits from thinking through problems.
"I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day"
I see a number of anecdotes like this and they all seem to miss that their actual anecdote is actually something like: I saved a non-coder X hours by drawing on my thousands of hours of experience.
No one disputes that knowing how to code would be useful to many people. What's being disputed is how useful it is for the time everyone would have to invest. Perhaps it would be more efficient to have professional coders going around and helping automate tasks for admin people than it would be to enroll all the admin people in coding classes.
Maybe everyone should know how to brew delicious coffee or maybe only the coffee aficionados will do that and the rest of us get by with a combination of whatever dreck our Mr. Coffee at home spits out and by handing our money to baristas the rest of the time.
This case was actually embarrassingly simple -- a keyboard macro script. Arrow down, tab, ctrl-a, ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v, alt-tab, tab, repeat. I had never written such a script before, I just saw her hand motions were repetitive and figured it could be automated. Time spent was 1 minute looking at the keys entered, 15 minutes searching how to send keystrokes, and a few minutes deploying.
If admin people had some familiarity with coding and such, they'd be more quick to realise "wait, I'm acting like a mindless robot - this has to be scriptable somehow". Yet I've seen this kind of manual repetition (copying parts of an Excel sheet, concatenating files, etc.) plenty of times. It's often surprising to the admin people that some things are automatable, and some things are so obvious to programmers, that sometimes neither side realises there's a problem that can be fixed.
I'm working in a site with a sysadmin type and graphic designer currently. They don't realize that when we need to uncheck a box in the admin for 800 products, sitting there and manually unchecking 800 boxes is not the way to do it. I just shake my head as if they're insane and write 1 line of SQL.
I don't think anyone's saying that non-coders need to become thousands-of-hours coders. But being aware that it's possible to automate these tasks makes (or so the thinking goes) people more likely to realize that specific tasks can be automated.
I have a project rather similar to your "going around and helping automate" in my backlog at work, actually, but it'd be a lot more efficient if the people doing the work were in a place to have an idea of what my time would be best used doing rather than me having to do the digging.
I have to agree with Kevin Drum on this. On the list of vital life skills that everyone should know, coding is not in the top ten.
This being Hacker News, it shouldn't be surprising that we tend to put software development on a pedestal. This thread is devoid of "I saved a coder 20 years of his life by administering CPR"-type anecdotes that would make coding appear far less attractive as a skill.
As more people start using datasets in some capacity for their "real jobs", being able to automate things becomes increasingly important. The amount of insane labor going on using Office boggles my mind. Knowing coding will at least get people to say "wait, there's gotta be a better way" even if they can't accomplish it themselves. Not to mention the cognitive benefits from thinking through problems.