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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

#131

Post by amalcon »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #121
Ericson2314 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of the ML hype is business people wanting something that everyone can operate equally poorly. The fact that so much of ML is inscrutable alchemy and a guessing game is a feature not bug.

But ML (from a pure programming perspective) is just a lot of mathematical functions being strung together, usually as part of high level libraries. If you truly have good data, approximating a signal from noise is trivial. It's way less complicated code than, say, your bank's web app and payments system.

So is everything else in software. Literally everything a computer can do is a form of math; it only seems like you're ever doing something not-math because we've made some very good abstractions over the math.

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

#132

Post by bob1029 »

Empowering smart people to succeed is easy, even if they dont understand your source code rune magic.

You jusy have to shift to a perspective of being an enabler/tech delegate for others. Most of that requires listening and willingness to be wrong, not individual contribution.

We have spent the last 2 years building tools and models that allow for our non-developer domain experts to handle 90%+ of software implementation concerns.

The biggest techinical key in my view is taking a data-oriented stance. This allows for you to talk about most problems in terms of excel spreadsheets, and any business logic can be developed in terms of SQL queries over those tables.

Having a rockstar developer contribute on an individual basis is amazing. Having that developer empower 1000 other employees to operate at even 1% their capacity is beyond amazing. It's also a lot more sustainable.

The elite developers who are capable of building these ecosystems don't grow on trees. If you find yourself with one, maybe have them build the fishing boat factory for you instead of forcing them to fish for every goddamn meal.

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

#133

Post by kthejoker2 »

The number of people conflating the high degree of skills and traits required to be a successful professional software engineer with the basic computer literacy and "hold my beer" ingenuity of day to day "citizen development" of Excel macros, RAD tools, and browser boommarklets is infuriating.

If you are one of those people: stop right now and go watch someone build something PowerApp or Appian.

Here's a good representative videos, feel free to watch at 2x speed, the details are unimportant.

https://youtu.be/s6-C2xismq4

And then read the comments on that video.

THAT is who this article is talking about; THOSE are citizen developers.

They are not learning Python or Go or recursion or symbolic logic. They are not on StackOverflow or Dev.To, they're not contributing on GitHub, they're not applying for Staff Engineer or even entry level web dev positions.

And they’re self-servicing precisely because anyone who knows how to code like a professional is working on way harder technical problems.

A Michelin chef makes thousands of meals a week, but they can't feed the world.

So we have cookbooks and air fryers and microwaves and ready to eat meals and yes they’re unhealthy or taste like cardboard or whatever but they fill the need.

Nobody is insisting everyone's food be made by Beard winners; but somehow they can't make the same leap that people can develop computer-aided solutions to their business problems without being Alan Turing.

And the "revolution" is just that automation of the middleware required to support these kind of folks - APIs, IaC, data catalogs - is reaching critical mass.

The available ingredients for the "cookbook" are better, and so the possible recipes are better.

Sprinkle in a little AI (think Clippy on steroids) and the home "cook" can make a satisfying enough meal.

Will they work at FAANG or build the next one? No? Who cares...?

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

#134

Post by nickkell »

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…

Yeah it turns out to be a mess, but it sometimes gets businesses off the ground. It’s crazy to think how much of the world’s software really consists of spreadsheets and macros.

Would you rather have a lot of businesses operating successfully with “poor” software or much fewer businesses operating with “good” software?

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

#135

Post by mrweasel »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #90
booleandilemma wrote: post #52

A lot of non-programmer office workers I've met aren't capable of writing software. Full stop. They're simply too incompetent. It's an uncomfortable truth. I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira, business analysts who aren't able to have a written conversation, product owners who struggle to create Outlook calendar invites. Imagine asking these same people to write software rather than just…

Does anyone not have trouble navigating Jira? I play Europa Universalis 4[0], and I feel like Jira is more complicated. 0: https://external-preview.redd.it/at0EwQpHU6A3xyU0KW80bc3aVMZ...

Jira isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and I struggle to suggest any real alternative. The problem is that Jira do a lot of different things, and mixing those those things results in people having a bad time.

An example: don’t try to use Kanban board unless you’re planning on doing so in all project. Jira will happily show “kanban” tickets in the same overview as an ITIL incident, resulting in teams having to mentally switch between different workflows.

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

#136

Post by mrkentutbabi »

Retric wrote: post #85
mrkentutbabi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need to spend time teaching a few semesters to have this belief completely turned upside down. I know, because it happened to me.

That wasn’t just a guess, the logo thing was from actual experience. I have also known people that learned to code over a decade that needed to copy peoples homework to get through collage. One spent a long time setting up and troubleshooting network routers before things clicked. Another learned via increasingly complex sysadmin scripts, until he fell in a pure programming job. Meanwhile a coworker of mine had a phi…

Seems you were having some good students. Try to teach in some community college or low income area.

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

#137

Post by boppo1 »

orev wrote: post #84
burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that having a knack for math necessarily matters for making a good programmer. I’ve known many good engineers who were drawn to programming because math was hard for them and they wanted to learn how to get the computer to do it for them. Ironically, coming to understand programming can be a way to understand math better. One of the best programmers I know is a philosophy major, who thinks of code like…

> it helps to be a systems-thinker, and to be able to zoom out and ask “what are we really trying to accomplish here.” Most of the time the elegant software solutions come not from writing brilliant code, but from reframing the problem so that simple code can solve it. This is exactly what math as a subject in school teaches you. Other subjects can too, but math seems to uniquely challenge people to really bend their…

>This is exactly what math... teaches you.

This is more or less agreeable.

>...as a subject in school...

Maybe for a lucky few. My entire math career in school, from middle school through university, grades were based on homework completion. I even had one sadistic teacher who would grade a semester's homework twice. Imagine getting Bs on tests with no curve, but getting a D in the class. I remember in highschool and uni, that there were often one or two kids who would do the homework and then it would get passed around and copied by half the class.

I would go so far as to say math-in-school was about successfully processing complex tasks without needing to understand them, as well as the value of teamwork & organization.

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

#138

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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’…

How often have you found the metaphor that a computer is an extremely stupid employee with no common sense to be a useful prompt at getting business people to think of corner cases?

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

#139

Post by marginalia_nu »

booleandilemma wrote: post #52

A lot of non-programmer office workers I've met aren't capable of writing software. Full stop. They're simply too incompetent. It's an uncomfortable truth. I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira, business analysts who aren't able to have a written conversation, product owners who struggle to create Outlook calendar invites. Imagine asking these same people to write software rather than just…

> I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira

I've been programming for 20 years and I still can't navigate Jira. The interface makes vim feel like a marvel of intuitive interface design.

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

#140

Post by BeFlatXIII »

pasquinelli wrote: post #25
dmitrygr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

i've been homeschooling my daughter through middle school. she's very smart, she's been in the highly capable program since maybe 2nd grade. she honestly surprises me with her ability to reason, but i've yet to hit on a way to get her to understand loops. i've been considering learning an array language with her in the hopes that it would allow her the chance to get interested in programming and excited about its pot…

What languages has she been learning and do they have list comprehensions?
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