<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>