In my non-tech job (basically school registrar), writing userscripts saves me a lot of time--in some extreme cases, it's allowed me to complete what for any of my coworkers would have been a week's worth of work in a few hours, and with far fewer mistakes.
Regular expressions and basic Unix utils are also amazingly valuable in non-tech jobs that involve computer use.
"Life skill"? Maybe not. Enormously valuable in bureaucratic jobs? Definitely.
If all bureaucrats knew how to program, then we would only need a fraction of the bureaucrats we have now. What would they do?
The point of bureaucracy is not to be efficient, it's to give jobs to people who otherwise would be flipping burgers or mopping floors, but are too educated for that. See hyper-bureaucratic countries like France for a vision of this.
I'm on the side of basic income for everyone to avoid this problem and reclaim efficiency in administrative processes, but in our judeo-christian cultures not working is considered a bad thing®, and thus this idea has a hard time gaining traction.
Bureaucracy is devilishly hard to automate. It's easy to have a guy who, say, approves house renovation plans (to use a hyper bureaucratic example). Writing software to process that? Pretty non-trivial AI problem.
This is one of the lessons that keep cropping up when they try to automate say claims administration at the VA. Something that's only 90% automatable might as well be 0%.
Is your assumption that businesses are thriving while wasting 10-30% of their revenue on busywork? If so, it should be trivial to crush them with your 10-30% reduction in overhead. Do it?
Is your theory that regulations requiring hard-to-automate bureaocratic work is created with the sly intention of creating busywork for people? Ah, special interests. They can lead to some messed up stuff, but most regulations are put in by well-meaning people trying (often ineffectually) to do what they're actually stated to be for--enforcing safety, fairness, etc.
I've regularly stated that I want most of my job automated away by Google, and we do have start-ups chipping away at old business models, but if it were entirely a matter of simply deciding to stop wasting money, I'm going to go out on a limb and say someone would've done it already.
