Learn programming

Key takeaways

• Basic familiarity with programming-related concepts is likely to be of considerable practical importance in a wide variety of jobs, including jobs that do not ostensibly require programming. Often, jobs may benefit from people's ability to maintain existing codebases, so a rudimentary familiarity with programming can be helpful here.
• A large number of people have absolutely no programming experience despite being cognitively capable of it, demonstrated by their having mastered academic material (such as calculus) that is comparably difficult to and draws on a comparable skill set as programming. Estimates suggest that only about 5-20% of first-years at elite colleges have programming experience when entering college.
• There exist many online resources to learn programming and hone one's skills in programming. The space is likely to expand significantly over the coming years.