Should you learn to code?

I was thinking about this a lot of times. There are many companies that still have more traditional approach to software development where software development process is considered as "second order citizen" in the process of bringing value to the users. Business oriented people in such companies are completely not aware how abilities of software enable or disable some value to be brought to the users and especially not aware how to optimize environment for better production of software in order to bring this value most efficiently.

Deciding deliberately not to learn to code (or at least to develop good understanding of software development process) in environment where software is expected to be the crucial part of the business is deciding to stay blind for the (most) important part of your business. From my point of view that is doomed to fail unless you are aware of that and deliberately take measures to prevent failure.

Someone would say that the most important is to bring the value to the users, which is not false at the end. What I saw is that business people too often underestimate how much software that brings value is part of the value itself and how it as well puts constraints on how value is brought to users.

Motivated by discussions with my peers regarding this topic I wrote small blog post on that some weeks ago. http://ivanjovanovic.com/2012/02/11/nobody-cares-about-your-...

I have seen a lot of people who think they have awesome ideas for a startup, but they do not know how to code. The lack of coding skills actually does not let them see the actual complexity and use of their idea and hence it's feasibility.

Also having coding skills, really gives you the power to innovate, its quite common that the idea can change drastically over the course of development, and that happens only because when you start coding you can see the merits and demerits of your ideas. You understand where you can improve and what you drop.