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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

#181

Post by tempacct3575 »

ludamad wrote: post #171
solarkraft wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better term is "visual programming" I tend to agree. "No code" seems to imply "no programming", but that's exactly what you do with these tools, just in a simplified way.

It also isn't always simpler. Once you're visually flowcharting minor text transforms "low code" is a misnomer

Yeah, text transforms are a bit of a nightmare in almost every platform. Most low code platforms have an expression or macro/function editor that would be used to deal with those - it's also ugly there. For my team, we usually cleaned them up in the back end services since citizen developers are not too familiar with these kinds of issues.

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

#182

Post by phkahler »

duxup wrote: post #162
DarylZero wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Computer Science was always supposed to be taught to everyone, and it wasn’t about getting a job: A historical perspective" https://computinged.wordpress.com/2021/11/26/computer-scienc...

I think that’s probably the opinion of many academic focused people about their profession.

My kid had a "computer science" class in 9th grade. They covered bits and bytes, discussed what files are, and then talked in the abstract about data compression so they know at a basic level why a wave file is so much bigger than mp3. They did get to some coding, but they covered a lot of basics that form the trunk of the tree. Most adults don't understand things in that way.

It's like teaching biology so people have a rudimentary idea of viruses and don't think vaccines have 5g tracking. Or so teenagers understand reproduction and don't think ridiculous things about how one gets pregnant.

Or how about chemistry, so people understand why con-trails form.

Basic understanding of things - particularly the ones everyone uses daily - is a good thing.

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

#183

Post by mg794613 »

Ah yes, the no-code dream of shareholders. ”Why pay those pesky developers if you can just click it together, how hard can it really be, I became CEO/sales/random-other-thing because I'm really smart, so this will be easy too.”

Every year I see this post rear its head, can we agree we only post it again when it's actually possible and not some CEO 'has a great idea that nobody thought about'?

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

#184

Post by horns4lyfe »

analog31 wrote: post #82
version_five wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. Yes! I wish this point got more attention. So many articles - there was one on here from a16z today - pretend there is this magical thing called learning to code that takes a couple months and suddenly puts you on par with every software developer. The analogy I like to use is claimin…

To the casual observer, the stereotypical age of computer programmers contradicts your claim. ;-) While I can certainly appreciate that it takes time to mature as a developer, the job market at least reinforces the idea that you can get hired at the entry level after maybe a couple years of study. My mom's programming students got hired that quickly in the 1980s. What I do think is that the small part of software dev…

Well ya, “entry level”, you said it yourself.

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

#185

Post by claytonjy »

tyingq wrote: post #144
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #143

In my experience, whenever user-developed software grows to achieve some kind of critical mass in a large company, it is nearly always discovered that the rapid development and agility was achieved by a complete disregard for the kind of table-stakes engineering practices most take for granted. Like: "Oh, you control changes to your massive Excel macro that Does The Thing by renaming the sheet and putting it on a sha…

Though I have seen user-developed software used the right way, I've also seen what you've described. Aside from the concerns you raise, there also a tendency for information to get siloed. Different areas of the business start hoarding data. And people start using the same term to describe different things, etc. The incentive to share and use common definitions is often lost.

As someone who hasn't seen user-developed software built the right way, I'm very curious to know what enabled such an outcome. What processes or infrastructure helped prevent the situation described in the parent comment?

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

#186

Post by tyingq »

claytonjy wrote: post #185
tyingq wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I have seen user-developed software used the right way, I've also seen what you've described. Aside from the concerns you raise, there also a tendency for information to get siloed. Different areas of the business start hoarding data. And people start using the same term to describe different things, etc. The incentive to share and use common definitions is often lost.

As someone who hasn't seen user-developed software built the right way, I'm very curious to know what enabled such an outcome. What processes or infrastructure helped prevent the situation described in the parent comment?

I imagine there's other ways to do it, but the biggest difference was a sort of centralized visibility and watching the user-developed stuff as it evolved. Then interceding politely to get anything off fixed. Linking like tables, identifying who the authoritative source is, changing field names, providing some sort of discovery of what exists, pointing out data privacy issues, etc.

Basically making sure there's a caretaker, and that they try to help and guide versus lock down and dictate, where practical.

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

#187

Post by claytonjy »

mrweasel wrote: post #135
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, but the need to know special rules like this is exactly why JIRA's UX is so awful. I want my project management tools to guide us into a pit of success, not a dark rabbit hole full of sharp object.

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

#188

Post by claytonjy »

tyingq wrote: post #186
claytonjy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who hasn't seen user-developed software built the right way, I'm very curious to know what enabled such an outcome. What processes or infrastructure helped prevent the situation described in the parent comment?

I imagine there's other ways to do it, but the biggest difference was a sort of centralized visibility and watching the user-developed stuff as it evolved. Then interceding politely to get anything off fixed. Linking like tables, identifying who the authoritative source is, changing field names, providing some sort of discovery of what exists, pointing out data privacy issues, etc. Basically making sure there's a car…

Is that "a" caretaker, or a team? From your first paragraph it sounds like an awful lot of oversight, to where this sort of "user developed software" is rather different in spirit from what we're generally describing with that term.

Excel would lead to far fewer problems if you had a centralized "spreadsheet unification and QA" team overseeing all the spreadsheets...but then you'd see people opting out of that in order to move quickly, and the problem repeats itself.

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

#189

Post by duxup »

phkahler wrote: post #182
duxup wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s probably the opinion of many academic focused people about their profession.

My kid had a "computer science" class in 9th grade. They covered bits and bytes, discussed what files are, and then talked in the abstract about data compression so they know at a basic level why a wave file is so much bigger than mp3. They did get to some coding, but they covered a lot of basics that form the trunk of the tree. Most adults don't understand things in that way. It's like teaching biology so people hav…

Yeah I’m the type that needs to make things. Theory makes no sense to me if i don’t see it in action. I struggled in a traditional theory / coding educational environment and dropped out of college.

Decades later I learned coding in a more hands on / make things way and I’m having fun working my way “backwards” into theory.

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

#190

Post by groone »

mrkentutbabi wrote: post #136
Retric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People cannot code if you ask them to do something they don't understand.

I have seen people who have none of step, if and loop basics nailed down sitting in C++ class and be very frustrated why nothing they do is "correct". They hope get lucky and get their program right by throwing some things at the wall. That is because they have never experienced successfully putting multiple simple steps together in a list to achieve something meaningful.

Play some kid games where you need to put in steps, if statements and loops to move some character around obstacles. Need to give time to intuitively understand and develop curiosity about what is possible next. Then learn what is an API and what can be done when interacting with those. Then go to overview of a code file, variables and Hello world.

When people are clueless and you say it is "simple" - It is over. Few minutes later their brain starts blocking everything that looks like code to preserve their ego and they lose all interest.

That is result of skipping basics not giving a week to feel good about successfully playing some game with steps, ifs and loops. Going forward while still clueless and before interest for next step is in place.

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