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Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

economist.com

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Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#31

Post by akavi »

solarmist wrote: post #22
decremental wrote: post #5

What 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!

There's nothing special about software engineering beyond: - meticulous attention to detail, - explicit deductive reasoning, - an ability to understand and build abstractions, - a high tolerance for frustration, - and a love of instant gratification when things work. None of these are rare traits. But the cluster of traits isn't widespread. Which is to say it's not common among people in general, but also not unusual…

"Explicit deductive reasoning" is pretty darn rare.

(and "meticulous attention to detail" is not strictly necessary, as my own career attests.)

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#33

Post by solarmist »

baash05 wrote: post #20
decremental wrote: post #5

What 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!

See it's not really ego. I'd say most people could be good at coding. But most people could be good electricians, and plumbers and mechanics, and carpenters, and ... well and heaps of other things. It's that it all takes training, and time in. It all takes reading and learning new things. It's not a question of could they be good. It's a question of, do they want to. I don't think most people want to be good at it.

Technically accurate, but not practically true.

If you've ever needed to teach someone patience, you'd see the futility of trying to teach a random person programming.

Nowadays, I will tell people straight out I can't see them dealing with the frustrations long enough to develop the patience needed to learn the basics.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#34

Post by pasquinelli »

dmitrygr wrote: post #18
pasquinelli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, you made me (try) to read the article to confirm you didn't get it, but i can only see two paragraphs. still, it seems that was enough to see it isn't about making software that others will pay for, but about avoiding paying a pro to make software when a novice can sling something good enough together. someone with another job doesn't need to make software someone will pay money for. their real job is how they…

> code isn't basketball, it's duck tape. And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...

hate to break it to you, that mess was made by the duck tape specialists.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#35

Post by solarmist »

incompatible wrote: post #30
decremental wrote: post #5

What 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!

My impression is that most people can't be good at it because they have no interest in it, and no willingness to spend time on it, learning and practising.

I see it even more simply. Most people can't handle something being so stupid and frustrating. And the bigger their delusions on how smart computers are the less possible it is.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#36

Post by baash05 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #13
kitrose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some people just cannot wrap their head around pointers. Some just do not get recursion no matter what. I used to teach CS, and tutor in CS. It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly. And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much...

In their defence.. Most modern languages don't really make use of these.

I mean recursion is almost never better than a while loop (stacks don't love it), and pointers... Yeah everything in JS and Python, Elixir and Ruby is really a pointer (most everything) but the average day to day it's not something devs care all that much about.

As an ex c and c++ dev, and CS grad, I know about them. I think if I pushed myself, I could find perhaps 5 times in the last 10 years where knowing that things are pass by references in ruby was expressed as such.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

solarmist wrote: post #7

Honestly 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…

Excel is a disaster. It will randomly corrupt input that happens to fit certain patterns by parsing it into "dates" or "numbers", unless you go to the trouble of explicitly setting the right "cell properties" via the incredibly clunky UI. It hides the code that's input in cells, lets it randomly mix with input data and does not support any kind of source control for it. It's not even fit for purpose as a prototyping tool, you're literally better off writing some code in FORTRAN IV and key-punching it into a fresh deck of punched cards. At least you're going to have proper code/data separation.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#39

Post by solarmist »

akavi wrote: post #31
solarmist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing special about software engineering beyond: - meticulous attention to detail, - explicit deductive reasoning, - an ability to understand and build abstractions, - a high tolerance for frustration, - and a love of instant gratification when things work. None of these are rare traits. But the cluster of traits isn't widespread. Which is to say it's not common among people in general, but also not unusual…

"Explicit deductive reasoning" is pretty darn rare. (and "meticulous attention to detail" is not strictly necessary, as my own career attests.)

It is, but we have a repeatable process for teaching it. And it CAN be learned by anyone with a patient teacher and several years.

I'd disagree. Debugging IS meticulous attention to detail. A single misspelling is often fatal. And if you've figured out how to program without debugging I'd love to know your secret.

I'd guess your baseline for that metric is enormously skewed by the people you spend time around. Even completing Algebra 2 requires meticulous attention to detail.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#40

Post by Zababa »

solarmist wrote: post #22
decremental wrote: post #5

What 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!

There's nothing special about software engineering beyond: - meticulous attention to detail, - explicit deductive reasoning, - an ability to understand and build abstractions, - a high tolerance for frustration, - and a love of instant gratification when things work. None of these are rare traits. But the cluster of traits isn't widespread. Which is to say it's not common among people in general, but also not unusual…

You can add to that being able to work in group.
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