Why Everyone Should Learn Programming

A famous programmer in Indonesia once said “programming might not be for everyone, but everyone' should learn programming”

In my previous job, being an operations manager for an event management system company required me to also understand a bit how the system should work. This means during the troubleshooting, there will be times when I had to solve the technical issues myself. While doing some little coding works as I was instructed by the tech team, even doing some little stuff like checking the connection using the code “ping”, I felt really cool.

By then, I always wondered how some codes can determine what will appear on the screen, and how some letters written in some patterns can make something to work.

The past week I found the challenge called #21daysofcode, and it’s a good start for anyone who wanted to learn to code but hasn’t had any background in it. I started a few days learning to code from scratch, literally from 0 like writing that “HELLO WORLD” on the screen, and here’s what I understand why senior programmers always said that all of us should learn how to code.

Problem Solving

In my current job, I got an opportunity to host the weekly LIVE sessions with senior programmers, CEOs, CTOs, programmer influencers, and other high-level profiles who are involved in the programming world. From all the sessions I’ve had with them, there is one similar answer that they always answer to the question of “why do people need to learn to program?” , and the answer is because “programming forces us to have problem-solving”.

Looking from a few days’ experiences of me that I got from starting to learn how to code, I can tell that it is indeed true that programming forces us to learn problem-solving. It is logical, seeing the cases that we’re being faced while we code, such as we’re tasked to show a certain visualization on the screen, or how we’re tasked to manage something to work. Not only that we need to know what to write, but we also need to know what to solve first and next, in order to solve or achieve the main goal/issue.

Logical Thinking

In line with the problem-solving skill, another thing that we will learn doing while we start to code is logical thinking. How coding or programming teaches logical thinking is how we’re being forced to always try and going through multiple failures of codes until we can find the correct codes and solve the problems. Coding teaches us to try to find our way through mistakes, learning to find the correct patterns and correct steps. From those steps, our brain will be trained to think more systematically and logically.

Diligence & Patience

My developer friends, especially those who work freelance used to tell me that programming needs a lot of diligence and patience. Sometimes as programmers or as people who start to program/code, we will be asked to create something and going through so many revisions. It includes the process of typing each of the codes and trying to figure out which ones should work and why others don’t.

Surely then programming does not only teaches us the programming skills, but also patience and diligence. I have learned that in order to be able to type HELLO WORLD or in order to show something on the website, we will need to go through multiple steps of learning and coding all over again.

Combining It All Together

Having multiple benefits that we can get from learning how to code, surely I agree when senior programmers say that “everyone should at least learn to code”. Not only for the benefits but also for career purposes. What I notice in today’s business world, regardless of which job fields or business fields that we’re working in, regardless if we’re in the sales or marketing department, we should at least have some basic understandings about programming or coding. The least that we can get from it is understanding how to talk and discuss things with our developer or programmer fellows. The more that we can do is helping ourselves with the technical problems that we might find during our regular business days. Understanding the tech-world and development is also important for our career development mindset so that we know what’s going on in today’s trends but also we will be able to analyze what can be improved and probably find another idea for another successful startup. Who knows!