Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?

1) recognize the law of leaky abstractions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction

2) recognize how this state of things is no different in software from the rest of what people create

3) deal with it the way you deal with it otherwise and apply your existing knowledge accordingly. software really isn't that brilliant most of the time.

Start thinking about how data moves. This is the simple first-principles trick that lets me understand things. What data is moving where? How is it moving?

If you want to get better at using technology, not just understanding it, I can give you a tip as a UI dev. Just ask yourself: "what would an overpaid designer named Ramona assume about the average user of this app". Unfortunately, most things have been enshittified, and no longer have manuals.

The problem with Excel, in my view, is that people start using it as a database, and things get convoluted from there on very fast.

Analyze your workflow regularly and see if you find any repetition to your work. It's not worth automating every tedious task you might do but if one is coming up regularly it is very well worth automating.

IMHO programming comes down to understanding logic, breaking down many-step problems into their smallest elements and being able to express a process in a flow or state chart. There is an old saying "behave yourself or I'll replace you with a very small script", which I assume comes from the Unix world. ZSH and shells are surprisingly powerful in this respect. Perhaps consider automation technologies like Zapier and Automator on the Mac? I suppose it's all about making ones (and others) lives easier with the minimum of effort.

Here's a little anecdote as an example. I was consulting on a job to increase efficiency, I noticed that there were changes that were being made by hand to PDF invoices generated by a system which could not be changed. I can't recall the exact changes, however it was trivial for me to chain together a PDF editing service with Zapier to automate bulk changes to invoices (the business was growing and the amount of invoices was increasing significantly each week). The entire process took less than an hour and saved hours worth of work each week for the admin staff. Hence the quote in the previous paragraph, a small script or automation did in fact replace a manual task for an admin person (in this case I didn't automate anyones job away thankfully ;-).

How to get better at technology is a very general question; but I'm assuming you mean technology as it applies to business - which apparently is supposed to be all about increasing efficiency. Technology for entertainment is a completely different game, etc. etc.