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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

#111

Post by agent86 »

solarmist wrote: post #44
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup, but you can make it do the job and that's enough for the majority.

It's not just that it can do the job, but that the majority has access to Excel. There may be better tools/platforms to solve a given problem, but in most cases the rank and file don't have access to them or permissions to do what they want.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

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

#112

Post by agent86 »

zdragnar wrote: post #9
mrkentutbabi wrote: post #3

Why 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.

Traditional programming? I would agree. But no code tooling? I think you'd be surprised.

As someone with experience supporting these types of people utilizing a no code platform, most of them actually thrive when given a toolset that is appropriate for the problem they are trying to solve.

The vast majority of the Excel/Access mess stems from the fact that those are the only tools people have access to use. Solutions get wedged in and people get into the weeds because if they can't make it work somehow they don't get a solution.

They build way more functional/sane things when given the right toolset to solve the problem.

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

#113

Post by sverhagen »

I'm a full-time developer, but I had a recent need for some quick internal tooling coincide with a HN posting about Budibase, and it sent me down a low code/no code rabbit hole. I evaluated a bunch of tools in that segment briefly, and spent a nontrivial amount of time on Budibase and Appsmith. And while I admire what they're trying to do, it was a disappointing journey. I made no serious progress, then threw together what I had in mind in React in half the time. Having spent some of this time researching that field, there sure seems to be a renaissance of what we'd call RAD (rapid application development) when I came of age. But it's astonishing how little progress was made since then. A younger me built some "applications" in Microsoft Access, which was not at all more frustrating than using these current day tools. So, Citizen Developers... good luck!

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

#114

Post by habeebtc »

sverhagen wrote: post #113

I'm a full-time developer, but I had a recent need for some quick internal tooling coincide with a HN posting about Budibase, and it sent me down a low code/no code rabbit hole. I evaluated a bunch of tools in that segment briefly, and spent a nontrivial amount of time on Budibase and Appsmith. And while I admire what they're trying to do, it was a disappointing journey. I made no serious progress, then threw togethe…

I am old enough to recall RAD, and young enough to have seen a few of these low/no code solutions come and go.

Don't get me wrong. I love them as a coder. Once I get the hang of them, I can bang out powerful stuff in a few minutes.

The problem is (IMO) to get to that level, you have to already be a coder to some extent. I strongly suspect this stated success story had a ton of upskilling help from MSFT, if not hand-holding.

I would not bet on a non-coder coming fresh to these platforms and building something useful with no other context. In their current state they are likely to be (very powerful) lazy programmer tools.

Until there is some paradigm shift I do not see the "Citizen Developer" becoming a practical reality. A field tech who crimps ethernet all day is going to have to learn some programmer skills to make a power app that pulls data from an API, parses the JSON and then does something useful with it.

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

#115

Post by agent86 »

danShumway wrote: post #87
dmitrygr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

"Our stuff made by professionals is also terrible" is maybe not the slam-dunk argument against democratizing code that people think it is. I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards ." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being writ…

Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving.

Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry.

But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways. Some horrible workflow for a small department that functions by manually juggling 3 spreadsheets may not rise to the level of an IT provided solution being created, but with the proper tooling the non-programmers can create a better solution than what currently exists.

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

#116

Post by onion2k »

reilly3000 wrote: post #104
onion2k wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So no code can work, just that the size limit of the program will be low (10-100 LOC) This ignores the fact that each "line of code" in a "no code" app does significantly more than 1 line of code. The benefit of no code tools is that they solve the very problem you're claiming stops them being useful.

Ok replace LOC with ‘Steps’. Its domain complexity, data types, relations, state, and the network that makes all of this hard. No-code doesn’t solve for big problems, but it sure does work for integration and the next million CRUD apps that fit highly specific niches. Somebody who can write clever excel formulas can pick up a no code tool and be productive on day 1. That doesn’t mean they can go from there to writing…

I don't think anyone is suggesting people will make operating systems in a no code app. They're designed to make building CRUD apps easy. The thing is though ... CRUD apps are 90% of the dev industry (by dev headcount, not revenue).

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

#117

Post by globalise83 »

orev wrote: post #64

One of the main differences I see on the road to learning to code has nothing to do with the tools; it’s the thought process. A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’…

You make some very good points. I think that one thing that is not at all obvious to most non-technical people is just how FAST computers can compute, even the most basic and low spec ones.

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

#118

Post by nikanj »

Programmers are essential to the modern business, and management absolutely hates that. It is very easy to extract money from the market, by promising management that they’ll no longer be dependent on programmers.

Code free, no code, visual development tool, rapid application development etc. has been a promised since the sixties or so.

Ever since the first programmer said “Hey this skill is pretty rare, I should get a nice raise”, have the bosses been saying “Free us from needing programmers, and we’ll pay whatever you want”

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

#119

Post by danShumway »

agent86 wrote: post #115
danShumway wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our stuff made by professionals is also terrible" is maybe not the slam-dunk argument against democratizing code that people think it is. I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards ." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being writ…

Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving. Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry. But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways…

Exactly. And in a lot ways this is something of an Open Source/hacker mantra: that people shouldn't have to ask permission from a bunch of gatekeepers to solve their own software problems, particularly when no one else is interested in solving them. Part of the narrative of hacker culture is a bunch of hobbyists looking at established businesses or processes that aren't addressing their needs and saying, "well heck you, I don't need your validation, I'm going to build software that accomplishes my goals and I don't care if you think it looks professional or not and I don't care if it scales to whatever tech stack or business that you think it needs to."

There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.

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

#120

Post by leadegroot »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #11

They'd all start trying to find their way into project management or design or something. Being able to code is an important part of being a software developer but being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. There are edge cases, debugging, scalability, one off errors integration, backups, etc. We tried this with VB and Acces and…

Yes, but it's going to be wonderful as prototyping. Then we go back and make the GUI accessible, the backend scalable, etc. People think we'll have no work - I am sure there will be even more work!
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