He's not saying everyone needs to be a programmer, but everyone needs to be able to program.

The number of times in all my jobs where I've seen people working on problems that could be done orders of magnitude faster with a bit of coding knowledge, is beyond count.

Reformat that document? How about a Regex? Analyse this data? Automatic graph generation and statistical methods. Keep records updated? Database with automated queries. Always building weekly reports? Template substitution and HTML generation.

There are so many jobs, that would not be considered anything to do with programming, that can be made hugely more efficient with a bit of coding knowledge.

As this video says, for most of this you don't even need to know algorithms or data structures or the 'important' stuff for being a programmer.

You just need to understand 'SELECT date FROM records WHERE quantity > 10'.

Or 'println("Report Week Ending " + date.GetToday()))'

Or 's/\[[A-Z]*\]/(&)/'