If you’re like me and spend a large portion of your day using a computer (technology in general) as a tool to earn your bread, you’re among the people whose number are growing yearly. Our economy is depending more on people who work smarter and less who work harder. They call it the knowledge economy and whether you agree with it or not, it is here to stay.
I was semi-aware of this, but I am now fully aware due to a singular event at work involving of all things, the humble Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application. Everyone uses Excel in one way or another working in an office. It doesn’t matter if you’re a manager, cubicle dweller or the receptionist. And everyone who’s ever used it has never dug deeper into the application itself than the buttons that do discreet things such as searching, sorting, graphing, etc. Basic tasks.
That’s all well and good until you have such a large spreadsheet that it becomes time prohibitive to do these things manually. The only alternative is to learn how to automate the task to produce say 50 graphs and charts. The only way to automate is to create a program to do all that automation. At that moment, I realized how fundamental it is in modern life that one should know even in a cursory manner what programming entails and be willing to dig deeper. It’s the equivalent to knowing basic automotive maintenance. You don’t need to know every aspect of it, but at least know where the major parts and how they work as part of the whole.