30th Jul 2018

CIO.com serves Chief Information Officers (CIOs), other IT leaders, as well as the ecosystem that surrounds and interacts with them. Yesterday they ran an article called “Why every tech pro should learn to code“. The article gives a great insight into the growing demand for coding skills in various IT positions, some fairly distant from software development. In it, they argue that programming is for more than just tech workers, with demand emerging as a necessary skill in data analysis, arts and design, engineering, information technology and science. It is also a great, flexible kay to stay competitive. For someone with IT skills, becoming relatively proficient in a new language can be done in a relatively short time with a little bit of discipline, and with several programming languages such as Python and R becoming super-hot commodities, providing a way to stay competitive and to improve your workflows, and possibly those around you.

Dave Karow, director of product marketing at BlazeMeter, a company focused on offering performance engineering platforms for DevOps, agrees. He says that you might have an employee who is great at creating macros in Excel – something that could benefit plenty of departments outside of IT. Or even an employee who can write a simple web-app to solve a small problem for the department, without having to go through IT and possibly wait months for a solution. “The point is that the future belongs to those who can create just what is needed, and quickly, rather than waiting months or years for some outside entity to deliver a packaged solution for them,” says Karow.

“You never know when coding knowledge will come in handy, but it’s guaranteed to help you get ahead in some way,” says Davis.