Well you're technically correct but I was hoping my point was clear beyond the vocabulary nit-picking. This being said I also suggested "the right amount" of va

Well you're technically correct but I was hoping my point was clear beyond the vocabulary nit-picking. This being said I also suggested "the right amount" of value such companies should put on those skills is none, because it suggest they have wrong priorities and/or unrealistic expectations of what they can achieve. You can't undervalue 0. Nit-picking works both ways but just lowers the quality conversation. In general precision is important but in this case it doesn't make that much of a difference besides a linguistic discussion. Let's try to look beyond it and more at the point I was trying to make: In the companies referenced above, as I understand them, valuing "programming expertise" at all is setting yourself up for disaster. You'll be tempted to use it but pretty much by definition in those companies you have no ability to support the outcome long term. Even tech focused companies have a hard time keeping up with the custom solutions they develop and are struggling with technical debt. If you worked in these companies you know how this goes and have seen the story countless times. IT manager of small IT dept has a "great idea", hires some people to implement it, and they get it sort of done with the limited resources. Pretty soon both the techies and the manager move on to greener pastures, leaving the solutions in the hands of someone with little to no interest in it but who has another "great idea". The best solutions are manageable ones and custom stuff is hard to manage in the best of cases. Programming expertise is like a live grenade, only useful in capable hands (which "non-tech" companies are almost without exception not).