I am not going to answer this question from company or future point of view. Of course, never read all that marketing bs and learn whatever you want. Become whoever you dream.
Nevertheless, programming is an essential skill which should be taught from early ages like writing and reading. In the future it will be the criteria to call a person educated. Everyone was learning many topics at school but you don't use most of them now. School should give a broad knowledge and show as many ways as possible.
Everyone should learn programming because:
- It improves memoery and prevents some deseases
- It trains brain to think
- It trains brain to make decisions
- It trains brain to understand risks and tradeoffs
- It shows how to apply "boring" topics from school like math and physics in real life. If a teacher or a professor can't explain how his lesson will help in real life, then he will fail. You are not buying smartphones because of it's name or marketing. You are buying it only because you know what exactly you will do with it, right?
- To understand how your computer or phone works and learn security aspects, protect own personal information, fix "my PC is running slowly" problems and do not download viruses every week.
- To learn how to build great presentations, spreadsheets and documents, how to use cloud and popular services like Google Drive and all with correct styling and formatting, and not that parody with inline styling, manual numbering, etc. I keep seeing even those who call themselves "managers" but can't write a single document...
- To be able to write simple scripts to improve your productivity or at least to learn many tricks and shorcuts. I've seen someone sitting in front of Windows 10 who was looking for a calculator on the table, at the end openned a calculator on the phone while all what was needed was to press Win+R, type "calc" and press Enter...
I am not saying everyone should be learning software engineering. Not everyone wants to be a geographer, but everyone learns geography because everyone still is a small geographer himself and should know how this world looks like, be able to read maps, etc.