Comment by TrackerFF

Purely anecdotal, but in my team of 20 data analysts, we've seen a bunch of them become quite productive in producing tools and apps. These are analysts with mostly domain knowledge, and not so much programming knowledge - meaning that they knew the basics to write scripts, and wrangle data programmatically, but not enough to actually engage in software engineering.

Some of these are now contributors.

I also have a friend (beware, N=1 study) with zero prior programming knowledge that has released his first app.