Comment by hqudsi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hqudsi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I honestly believe everyone working at a tech company should know or learn how to code even if it's just SQL or basic Python.

I'm more than happy creating some views in a SQL database and give business people access to a read only replica instance so they can do exploratory work on data without much involvement from engineering. I've seen so much developer time spent on generating reports for the business which takes time away from feature development.

And sure we might complain about data scientists handing us spaghetti jupyter notebooks or business analysts giving us rube goldberg excel sheets to productionize but I vastly prefer that over them telling us what they want in words. They are POCs and prototypes. It's fine if they are messy.

So if low code tools are thought of in the same vain as excel or jupyter notebooks, they can be pretty darn useful.

> I honestly believe everyone working at a tech company should know or learn how to code even if it's just SQL or basic Python.

Why? They should already know the native language like English in the US, which is perfectly capable of describing a problem. Unfortunately, many people are poor at communicating in the native language, which is a more fundamental problem. However, how does learning another language like Python or SQL make this any better, if they are unable to use their native language sufficiently?

While I agree that English or any other spoken language is sufficient to describe technical requirements, many people have trouble communicating what they actually want because the language itself is very forgiving and so there is room for misinterpretation.

At least with a programming language, which is more precis e and limited and what you can express, you are forced to think more precisely the desired logic.

I've taught and gave workshops to business people on programming and database query languages for data analysis include non-SQL ones like Mongo. And I can say that those that took to time to learn the query language communicated more effectively because they can send over a query and then use English to give more context, mostly around the presentation layer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com