Another issue is that discussing project requirements is usually done very badly. If you don't know any programming, you won't know when to ask for a professio

Another issue is that discussing project requirements is usually done very badly. If you don't know any programming, you won't know when to ask for a professional. You know that an automated weekly task is easy. You know that scraping names out of an API is easy. So you can do it yourself, or pay a pro a few hundred to do it. If the task to be automated was different, i.e. "put all the confidential emails into a special folder, and forward everything else to a public archive" then it would a little more expensive. You only know that because you know that computers can't differentiate "private" emails, wich you know because you know how to program.