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Comment by Sufrostico | Hacker News Reader

For DBA's should be a must, for automation purposes, backups, custom reports, etc, etc...

And for Marketing it's just kind of scary... some of those guys start by saying: "I know how to program and that feature could be ready in a day or a couple of hours"

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I work in marketing->e-commerce and I think it's a great idea to learn to "program". By no means am I a good developer, but I have played enough with Rails and PHP and deployed a couple of simple apps to production environments and I feel like I know enough to understand how to put together a coherent business requirements document.

I think if not programming, at least process modeling or class diagrams should be learned.

> I think it's a great idea to learn to "program".

Believed or not I'm completely agree with you, learn to program will definitely improve the way you work.

But sometimes, some guys with little involvement in a project that know "how to program" cause more damage than good.

This type of conversation begs the "put-up or shut-up answer" and if it works you get a new feature. the real trick is actually dealing with long-term support for something that might have started out as a hack. Features and short-term tests usually need to be refactored for long-term health. If you don't do the work up front be prepared to do a bit later, just make the choice consciously.

NOnononononono.

If it "works" superficially it will be considered good enough by management. High fives all around, the checklist is ticked off, and everybody moves on -- except for the poor developers have to maintain the mess.

Nimbleness doesn't mean creating crushing technical debt that has to be solved immediately by somebody else. :)

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