It's strange he made that point about plumbing, then later said you should learn how things work to solve real problems. He seems to have confused an initiativ

It's strange he made that point about plumbing, then later said you should learn how things work to solve real problems. He seems to have confused an initiative among some people to learn a new skill in their spare time with a totalitarian injunction that we all become programmers. To me it's no different to an initiative among people to learn a foreign language. It may be a somewhat qiuxotic spare-time hobby, but the prospect of acceptable failure is partly what part-time hobbies are for, right? Learning a bit of coding will give one an insight into how hard it is to get right, which will make one appreciate which bits are easy and which bits are hard. What's wrong with that? The little plumbing I've learned on my own initiative has taught me similar, and I'm less likely to get ripped off as a result.