1. Compare programming to home DIY. Sure, every year you'll have people who knock down load-bearing walls, get pesticide backwash into the drinking water, or t

1. Compare programming to home DIY. Sure, every year you'll have people who knock down load-bearing walls, get pesticide backwash into the drinking water, or turn a simple de-icing operation into a raging inferno. But people also assemble millions of shelves and beds, unclog millions of drains, and build thousands of greenhouses and planter boxes. 2. Professional programmers create awful messes too. They do it less often, but with greater consequences. Just like the contractors building a bridge are less likely to screw up than some goofball installing a new water heater at home, but a bad bridge is much more dangerous. Give people more training when the potential consequences of bad work are more severe, and less training when it's just not needed. 3. The value of someone with both domain knowledge and programming knowledge is usually immense. You can either teach a programmer about the domain, or you can teach a domain expert how to program. If you have a programmer with a bit of domain knowledge, then they know what kind of questions to ask the domain experts. If you have a domain expert with a bit of programming knowledge, then they know how to communicate technical requirements to a professional programmer. Let's take your analogy with the publishing house. If the fantastic storyteller can write but has major problems with grammar and continuity, then a good editor can clean things up.