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Comment by outsideoflife | Hacker News Reader

> Irrespective of your job, it will become important for everyone to learn how to code

It strikes me that the person who wrote that is used to associating with technical people, and might spend a little more time in the real world. I work in a company of 100 ish people, 15 are delivery drivers. 40 odd are sales assistants that customers value for their detailed product knowledge. 4 are involved in cleaning of different kinds. None of those people will ever learn to code, or need to learn to code, or frankly be capable of learning to code

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Completely agreed. Whoever wrote that should find a hobby or profession where being biased and living in a bubble doesn't cause others to be misinformed.

Do those sales people use complex spreadsheets? Are there major effeciency gains possible with a minor amount of scripting?

Depends on the role. But salespeople are there to sell stuff, the efficiency gains are orthogonal to the objective. Their job is to call people, go shake hands, get ink on dotted lines, etc. Not faff about with Excel.

Note: They also sell themselves to their bosses too. Hence why they tend to outlast engineers in largish orgs.

mostly agree, although the sales/asst folks being able to use spreadsheets and understanding equations and similar is helpful in many situations, although most folks wouldn't think of that as 'code' so much. I'm working with a client and I'm surprised (sort of) as to how much they can get done in spreadsheets. Coding would make their lives even easier wrt to many tasks, but managing electronic data with some excel scripting is 'good enough' (compared the where they were with paper 10 years ago).

Don't be like these people. Keep an open mind, be ready to adapt, and try to just be kind. Kindness is one thing I can guarantee you'll want to have as a skill, in any future.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/155984/worst_tech_prediction...

I was the author. I could have reworded. I still think computational thinking is an important skill irrespective of your job role & is actually a pretty powerful tool that helps you solve problems and make decisions. Coding is one of the fastest ways to get there.

Completely agree but I would also agree if you would have said:

None of those people will ever learn to code, or need to learn to code, or frankly be capable of learning to code, neither, we devs, are interested in that..

Sales assistant jobs are being automated by AI Cleaning tasks are being replaced by robotics With 40% of jobs soon to be replaced by automation, if your colleagues want to stay ahead, they should learn to code.

[citation needed]

The U.S. will be hit worse by job automation than other major economies A new study from PwC estimates that 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be lost to automation in the next 15 years. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/25/15051308/us-uk-germany-japa...

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