&gt;&gt; To me, programming is roughly on the level of calculus; for some professions&#x2F;people it is critical. For others it may only be useful once in a while.<p>But programming is a hammer that turns almost everything into a nail (in a good they-really-are-nails kind of way). Many programmers may not realize this because their jobs have always been to program. Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn&#x27;t really find a compelling reason why.<p>You (assuming you can program) will have a bunch of scripts that do all your boring shit. You will run most of these scripts once a day in the morning, and spend the rest of the day on Hacker News pretending to work and waiting until a believable number of hours has passed before turning in the spreadsheet that one of your scripts produced. When you want to mess with someone you will give them something immediately after the script runs and not tell them how.<p>There&#x27;s still plenty of stuff that you can&#x27;t bespoke automate, but the boring automation-friendly stuff takes up most of the day in most jobs. When you don&#x27;t know what a hammer is, nails look like twigs that rust.