Recently a friend was telling me that the marketing people at his office were often asking the developers for different data sets they needed to conduct their research. It was hard for them to get to those requests quickly though, because the developers were busy as it was. It was what he told me next that really got my attention, however: instead of waiting on the Dev team to solve the problem for them, the marketing team made up for the gap by teaching themselves SQL. How exciting!  Imagine the dividends that’s going to pay them and the company. It saves time, and it exposes them to a whole new way of thinking about what they do. It frees them up to explore the data to their hearts content, they spend less time trying to think of what to explore, and more time mining for valuable data.

It’s funny where people make their investments. In many businesses you tend to find very formalized departments. Segregated specialization is one way to keep responsibility organized, and on paper it seems efficient, but if you’ve worked at that kind of place you probably feel otherwise. How many ten-person meetings must you sit in? How many emails do you wait for the right people to reply to? How many requests for work that you are not supposed to do must you send before it gets done? Do you really want your employees thinking about what they do as “my part” and “their part?” Does one hand do anything if it’s always asking the other hand what it’s doing?

One thing I’m always really pleasantly surprised about is how many people at the office dabble in, or have an interest in code. I’ve even caught our Director of Client Relations, Kaitlin, doing a tutorial on Ruby Monk after 6pm on a Tuesday night. I don’t really think I should find that surprising, as impressive as it is. This business runs on code, and I work with some really smart people. If anything, it has made me surprised that businesses don’t do more to encourage their employees to learn to code.

There are many reasons I think this is the case. The first is that people tend to have a really consumer software oriented view of programming. You expect people who code to be focused on writing programs that sell, but one of the best things about programming is making annoying tasks easier for yourself. A language like Ruby is a great productivity tool. The ability to automate away simple tasks is not that difficult of a level to achieve, and the knowledge gained in learning to do something like that will most certainly grow into a whole new skill set. Instead of manually updating 100 file names, wouldn’t it be more productive to just write a script to do it automatically, and then use that script the next time? That’s fun and cool! We should think of having this kind of skill more like knowing Excel, and less like a dark art.

A second reason in my opinion is that people have a bit of trouble gauging competency. What people do assume is that anyone who can write code must be a genius. This is a myth propagated by the idea of the valiant hacker who, infused with caffeine and pizza, swoops in to save the day, rescuing the common folks with his or her magnificent brain. Don’t believe it. You’re smart, you can learn to code. Even if you’re not smart- you can learn to code, and what’s more, you can probably find someone to pay you to do it. It’s crazy how high the demand is right now.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was “always be trying to work yourself out of a job.” The truth is, if you don’t, someone else is going to. It might not be today, but it will be in your lifetime. An entire generation is growing up right now in a world that understands the value of being able to write code. A whole economy is being created around using technology to make us better at what we do. Computers give us a way to redefine the rules of our world, and that’s what makes them so compelling. You can take part in that or not, but it’s not likely that you can avoid it. Stop planning to sneak by, and start learning. Take steps now to gain competitive advantage by equipping yourself for the future that is already upon you.

A number of companies lately have started unique paid internship programs, and a handful of great new tutorial sites like Ruby Monk and Code Academy are popping up. More people are self-taught than you suspect, so don’t feel inferior if you go that route. I think you’ll find getting started easier than you expected, and be pleasantly surprised that your existing experience with computers has equipped you with skills you didn’t even know you had. If you get stuck: Google it, Google it, Google it. It takes some time to get comfortable, but luckily it is only a matter of time, so don’t give up. You can do anything, ignore the haters. Go forth.