There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps.
Fundamentally, that's what this article was getting at for me.
Should we (a) encourage more people to learn to code (in existing languages / frameworks), so that they might use coding to automate their own work, or (b) identify simplified systems that require less knowledge, but are sufficient for the automation tasks being asked of them.
I love learning about multi-level cache heirarchies and performance effects thereof.
But I would rather my company's accountants instead know the accounting-equivalent of that bit of trivia, and yet gain the benefit of being able to write simple automation on their computers.
My mother is an accountant for example, and she could easily pick up SQL or a programming language, but the issue with teaching her one is that it doesn't solve any of her immediate problems. Excel already automates most of that work away, so for her that's all she needs.
Your company's accountants can probably write excel statements that are equivalent to complex SQL statements, so I wouldn't underestimate them :)
If they don't come up with at least one strength or spend the whole answer bashing it, that's an instant reject for any position touching UX.
The clashing paradigms of the Data Model and "vanilla" Excel have really been aggravating me recently.
I feel like Excel is underutilized for cultural reasons and it seems like it can do anything I was previously asked to use Qlikview for.
But the fundamental reason I am using Excel these days is because I don't want to be subjected to a programming interview, ever again.
I got my current job without any particular technical requirements, and the interview was entirely about how I manage my time and multitask.
This talk addresses that misconception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ
The paper discusses "constructionism" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism....
There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.
If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them.
And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.