This skill that offers a lot of value, programming, has a mind-numbing user experience that deters any sane individual from participating.
The common reaction is, “Sure, they make a lot of money, but I’ll be human and have a life.”
The quandary is that this failure to adopt the programming skills is what perpetuates the present-day complaint called, the wage gap.
Programming is incredibly useful and in high demand. Lots of people want to build lots of things; the lack of people with the skills keeps the price high.
Those people who don’t code and want to build something, will pay someone else who can code to build their widget.
Because the majority of the population is so adverse to learning how to code and see it as an unapproachable endeavor, they pay a premium for the services.
This transaction occurs many, many, many times a day, and has been happening since the 70’s. Of course, there is a wage gap.
If you want to lower the wage gap, don’t pay so much for the people building things.
How do you lower the price?
Don’t pay so much by learning to code yourself. The cost will come down when everyone knows how to do it. If it were as ubiquitous a skill as basic manual labor, it would not cost so much.
An issue with the thinking around coding
It is easy for people to know how to add two items. I would say most people know when to use addition and when to use multiplication.
Can they write a few lines of code to do it? No.
That does not say anything about their intelligence. What it says is that computer programming languages have failed to provide a common person with a usable language to write algorithms.
The insane, who have learned, can hold a bit of pride and think, “Look what I can do, and you can’t.” They’ll rub it in, “You may want to add 2 + 2, but unless you pay me, you’ll never accomplish it.”