Not writing software, using it requires software literacy.

How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?

It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.

> How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?

I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.

For example, recently I was involved in a cache issue for an android phone. One of the answers on Google was to download some sort of cache cleaning program. Of course, I knew that this was likely to be a security risk, but others would have downloaded it.

People are naturally wary about this thing, so sometimes I don't mind if they'd prefer not to Google and implement a solution themselves.

>> I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.

To me this is a part of literacy: how to know what to search for, and how to know which results are relevant.

This literacy is particularly important because people operate in a field fraught with coercive, user-hostile design and scammers.

Somehown I think the literature on excel is lacking. Do you know any reference which shows 'how to use it' in your sense?

Software used to come with big beautiful manuals. I remember getting Borland Quattro and the box was a cube because the manuals were so thick. I think there are a lot of benefits to printed references but for me the biggest was accidentally finding something cool while looking for something else.

I think learning has changed as well. It’s no longer a (traditional canonical) reference that’s most useful (though Microsoft surely has one on each version of excel) but rather “how do I formulate a search to help myself here?”

Programmers have been doing GDD* for a while. Other knowledge workers will catch up or be left behind their peers.

I use Excel weekly, but not daily. The last thing I remember googling in it was last week and it was (for the fiftieth time) “excel format as millions”.

* Google Driven Development

Literacy is known at the top for things like the Iliad or the works of Shakespeare, but the major benefits are actually much more mundane, like allowing doctors to write prescriptions or being able to have instructions in a manual.

Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.

The first uses of literacy seem to be enabling beauracracy. Taxes, business records, laws, standardising things. The art stuff seems to have come later.

And what you describe is what leads to innovation.

Exactly :-)

IMHO software development is closest to research work. E.g. a software development company is much closer to a research institute or design center than an assembly line in a factory. Unfortunately in reality it's more often treated like a late-medieval manufactory, or at best a scriptorium in a monastery.

>I think it's more similar to any other profession

Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.

The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.

I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.

I honestly think what you're describing will take about 25-50 more years to happen, if ever. Whilst people are getting smarter and more capable, HN is a bubble of people who'll put in the effort to do the stuff you're describing. Systems like SAP/Salesforce and other mega ERP and management systems are filling that space. I expect people will just be learning to live in ecosystems. Similar to whats happening with the cloud in the present day for developers.

In large companies, accountants already spend much of their time building custom reports for management. A lot are in Excel, but other specialized tools are also common.

>>> accountants who can't write their own report generators.

what a great way to put it

Not everyone is interested in writing books...so no reason for them to learn to read or write.