This item in the linked video of Tim Cook at the White House Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting jumped out at me.
- Schools should educate all students in coding
I have believed this since early in my career and I think it is only growing stronger as programs are becoming pervasive in everyone’s work.
Let’s start with coding. I’ve always believed business people should have some training in coding. The reason is because of logic and understanding.
The logic is important because it shows a person can think in a structured way. They can take an abstract subject and build a structure around it. One of the biggest challenges of many companies is lots of data, but lack of information.
Data is equivalent to having a shoe box of pictures. The pictures are tough to find and use because they are just heap of pictures. To transform the data into information, the pictures have to be structured and indexed. This would entail categorizing the pictures in an addressable format where quick efficient access can be achieved.
A person who is a good programmer will have the mental tools to structure the data so access to important data points can be achieved quickly. If finding the right picture took an hour and now each can be accessed in a second, tremendous efficiency is achieved. This is a skill set that is very much needed in corporate America today.
The understanding part of coding is simple. When doing coding, it is impossible to complete a project without thoroughly understanding how all the different components of the project work independently and relatively to each other. You can’t fudge programming. You either understand the entire system or you don’t. Programming is a concrete subject in many ways. To finish a project, it is key to understanding the relationships among the various components.
Early in my career, I learned to program in Basic, Foxpro and VBA. By programming tasks, great efficiency is achieved and you develop a clear understanding of all the moving parts. I have applied these skills in every job I have ever held.
In my career, I have found that way too many finance and accounting people do not have programming skills. For this reason, the Excel spreadsheet is often terribly misused. What often should be a few simple input commands each time the process runs becomes a long, arduous and convoluted excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheets initially represent a simple solution, but quickly evolves into a pile of “spaghetti code”. Instead of an efficient and effective process, it becomes a bog of information that slows down the process, embeds systematic errors, lacks flexibility and is a unique “work of art”.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen spreadsheets that have a “freeform” structure and require numerous formula changes each time they are run. The whole idea behind a spreadsheet is to create efficiencies, but often that is far from the case.
By programming a process, it shows that the user clearly understands the process and has built structure around it.
I couldn’t agree with Tim Cook more!
