Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
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Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#2Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#3Why not? The problem is people can’t. I’m all for people learning how to code but majority of people can’t. That’s the reality.
I taught coding in college and bootcamps.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#4Not everyone can play in the NBA. Not everyone can safely drive a car. Not everyone can architect and write good code.
Yes, you can spend a LOT of time and get kinda good-ish at basketball, but you'll never make it to the NBA. You lack the biological talent (height, speed). Sure, you can work very hard and take serious driving classes, but you'll never win an F1 race even if given a chance. You lack the biological talent (reaction speed, ears able to better hear details in the engine noise, higher visual acuity). And sure, you can work very hard and learn how to write code, but that will not magically make you good at architecting solutions properly and producing code worth paying for. You lack the talent (ability to think abstractly)
Please do not try to counter any of these examples. They are clearly just that. I am sure sometime someone was short in the NBA and maybe your aunt once took a defensive driving class and it saved her life, but the point is clear.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#5What an ego shattering revelation it would be if it turned out just about everyone can be good at coding. Being able to code is what qualifies us to know everything about everything!
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#6Not everyone can play in the NBA. Not everyone can safely drive a car. Not everyone can architect and write good code. Yes, you can spend a LOT of time and get kinda good-ish at basketball, but you'll never make it to the NBA. You lack the biological talent (height, speed). Sure, you can work very hard and take serious driving classes, but you'll never win an F1 race even if given a chance. You lack the biological ta…
Aren’t they bad examples? There’s a distinction between an extremely rare occurrence of biological factors like being 7 feet tall in order to succeed, and that of needing a decent education in order to think critically.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#7Honestly we’re already working towards that. Between excel and no-code tools a lot of the grunt work can now be handled by the people who need it.
The majority of stuff out there will be commodity software implementing some simple business logic and software engineers don't want to do that stuff anyway which is why we’ve been writing ourselves out of those jobs for decades.
I have a very nontechinal marketing friend who routinely dives into WP sites to diagnose dependency issues after upgrades because her work no longer thinks she _needs_ programmer support. Or connect a up web/email forms to CRM in going or outgoing and needs no assistance to create complex conditional filled marketing campaigns.
And mostly they're right. She's bad at it. It takes at least 10x as long to fixes these issues, but they occur quarterly or less. And if she can not fix it then they hire a consultant/contractor to fix it.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#8Not everyone can play in the NBA. Not everyone can safely drive a car. Not everyone can architect and write good code. Yes, you can spend a LOT of time and get kinda good-ish at basketball, but you'll never make it to the NBA. You lack the biological talent (height, speed). Sure, you can work very hard and take serious driving classes, but you'll never win an F1 race even if given a chance. You lack the biological ta…
Not everyone can be a successful novelist, but we all can read and write.
It is OK to have basic literacy, and the educational system is quickly adopting coding as part of basic literacy. That, in turn is making more and more people good enough to do basic coding, even if they will never do it as a professional career.
Just like people play basketball in their drive. Just like they drive their cars around town.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#9Why not? The problem is people can’t. I’m all for people learning how to code but majority of people can’t. That’s the reality. I taught coding in college and bootcamps.
I've heard it said that Excel is the world's most popular IDE.
Given what I have seen of some spreadsheets, I am quite glad we don't push those people into programming who aren't interested in doing so.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#10Well, this makes me feel old. It's no revolution, but a reversion. It was the norm, not that long ago, that anyone could do minor programming. The era of Lotus Notes and the like.
You would still hire a programmer for the big stuff, but office workers would build little scripts, or look under the covers when something goes wrong.