Speaking as a non-coder, but as one who did minimal things with programming-like higher-level stuff ranging from the old DOS batch files to VBA and some dabbling with SQL, I am curious whether real engineers believe the idea of broad literacy in coding truly would be valuable and, if so, how exactly. I am not speaking as a skeptic, just as one who does not readily see the point and wants to know. Of course, we are in…
On the one hand, I concur with you, in that ability to produce a working system ex nihlio is both a) much, much harder than anyone suggesting the general populance Just Learn To Code expects and b) of limited utility to many people. To pick an example at random from the front page, there is virtually no problem with being severely poor in NYC that would get alleviated with any of the participants Just Learning To Code, unless that in the process transformed one of the involved adults into a responsible member of society. (There being many, many people in the story who could use that in addition to the obvious choices.)
Learning to code might assist people into having a better mental model of computers and a lot of computer-like systems which they interact with on a daily basis.
For example, you're a lawyer, and you have practical experience with how law and bureacracy works on a nuts and bolts level. I assume you've occasionally met people who believe that law/bureacracy operate in an entirely random and capricious fashion which cannot be influenced by their own behavior. Dealing with people who think that is a little trying, right? Both because it is wrong and because, more to the point, it causes them to take self-destructive courses of action. (To see many examples of this, see again the article on being extremely poor in NYC, where consequences are predictable based on past behavior seems to be as foreign as trying to explain thunderbolts as something-other-than-the-wrath-of-an-angry-god to ancient Greeks.)
If people had a mental model of how computers (and similar systems worked), it would improve their -- for lack of a better word -- digital citizenship. Paypal probably didn't freeze your account on a whim any more than the probation officer has decided to "violate" you based on personal animus. There was probably a heuristic triggered by behavior. More importantly, a) that behavior can be avoided in the future, b) that heuristic can probably be overridden by appeal to the relevant authorities, and c) that heuristic was probably instituted due to it achieving goals most of the time rather than as an instrument of oppression.
We could look back to a time in the not-too-distant past and say that, for the average citizen, knowing the nuts and bolts operation of the law was probably unnecessary: they didn't have touchpoints with the State that frequently and when they did the operation was well-understood by all parties. You don't have to understand the inner operations of magisterial courts all that well if you can appreciate that killing people is generally a bad idea. Recent years, however, have gotten the State into substantially more lines of business than just regulating who gets to kill who when. The average citizen can now expect to run into laws and their consequences quite frequently. At your job. At your doctor's. At your school. At your bank. When the government sends you a check. When you send the government a check. The average citizen is now expected to be able to make consequential decisions based on the law. There are many possible decisions which are wrong ones.
Similarly, in the not-too-distant past, you could have been totally ignorant about how computers operated. Computers were, after all, mostly maintained by other people and they didn't come into contact with your life that frequently. When they did, they were pretty easy to anticipate the function of even if you had no clue what Deep Magicks were invoked to cause it. The computer keeps a record of your bank balance, which it does via addition and subtraction, so you'd best assure addition and subtraction sums to greater than zero. As long as you do you'll have no problems with computers.
This is not the world we live in in 2013, and I would not bet that computers and similar systems become less relevant over time, any more than I'd bet that law suddenly decide to recede from its historically novel importance to people.
Computers operate consistently. Their rules are written in advance. It is easy to make mistakes in writing those rules. The symptoms of those mistakes will (generally) be predictable and consistent. Since computers operate according to rules, given the rules, we can make certain confident predictions about their behavior in advance of seeing it. Since computers operate according to rules, we can learn the rules they operate under by observation, and therefore make confident predictions about their future behavior by observation.
Everything I just said is something that you'll know in your bones by the time you've made your first substantial program, and yet they're Deep Magick to most people. Seriously. I think I could poll a family gathering of the McKenzies, whose average educational attainment is a master's, and probably get less than 20% of the family to agree that "Computers operate according to rules." My family, like most users, assumes that the devil box just does whatever it feels like and this is so frustrating when it stops them from getting their grant applications in on time.