#YesAllProfessions

Recently, I've seen an uptick in articles about how people in various non-engineering/science professions should learn to code. From MBA students learning to code to know their business better to law students learning to think like a lawyer by first learning to think like a system designer, the cognitive benefits of learning to code are obvious. Fields such as finance are so heavily tied to data-driven processes that one venture fund actually put an algorithm on its board.  

While simply knowing how to program has myriad benefits even if you never write another line of code in your life, once you know how to code you are more likely to identify ways in which writing code can help you do your (non-tech) job.

You won't find writing software anywhere in my job description, but if I were to list all of the times I've written a computer program to help me better perform my job, I'd be writing all day. Writing code allows me to sift through large amounts of data to help myself and my colleagues make better decisions.   I make maps, graphs, lists, and summaries by writing short programs that we would otherwise either enlist interns to devote time making or would otherwise be unable to do entirely.

These programming tasks are often very small - sometimes taking just minutes to complete, and rarely more than a few hours.  Just to explain the problem to a non-lawyer developer would often take as much time as it takes me to write the program because I have the benefit of having both a complete understanding of the problem and the skills necessary to solve it.

This is, I'm sure, part of why V. David Zvenyach is writing a free online Coding for Lawyers book. While computer science is a complex and challenging field, learning to write simple programs it not hard.  I encourage everyone to take advantage of various free online resources to learn to code, such as the Code Academy or the Hour of Code exercises on code.org.