<p>For a business or econ major, would taking any programming courses be any useful (or perhaps even gettin a comp sci minor)? Would one carry any advantage in the future looking for a job in business if he had programming skills? Now I know this probably depends a lot on which fields in business I’m looking at, so I ask… in which fields does having programming experience come in handy?</p>
<p>it consulting, trading</p>
<p>A lot of jobs actually would benefit from programming skills… business analyst, systems analyst (a hot job–growing fast, paying well!!), accountant, marketing professional, etc. Computer skills are essential in today’s business world, and are likely to become even more critical in the very near future.</p>
<p>even as a financial analyst (banking, etc.) you can benefit a ton by learning some programming languages…knowing VBA for example can save you TONS of time when working because with VBA you can program excel to do a bunch of **** in seconds that would have taken you weeks to actually do. It’s also beneficial to know SQL.</p>
<p>It depends on what your goal is with respect to learning how to program. If you simply want an added advantage but don’t plan to be a hardcore programmer, then learning the language for VBA, Access, and SQL will help a lot. </p>
<p>If you think you want to be more of a serious programmer, then learning how to program widely used languages such as Java, C, C++, etc. would be more useful. There’s also a difference between learning programming languages and learning how to write programs. Most computer science students and hardcore programmers first learn how to write good programs in a one language or another and after they have the basics down, they simply have to learn the different syntax and style of other programming languages.</p>