Twitter, but without code

If someone doesn't want to dig in to building something for themselves they won't no matter how easy you make the tools. WYSIWYG editors have been around for decades but programmers still have a job. They've gone from writing crazy cobol to doing .net but they are still doing it.

I'm sure this is not the tool, but I'm also sure that when the tool comes along that busts this open most developers (including myself, in all likelihood) will fail to recognize what it can do and will mock its intentions, just because that's the way we humans work. So, in closing, I leave you with the lines of an old Scottish folk song:

If it wasn't for the weavers, what would ye do? Ye wouldn't have your clothes that's made of wool! Ye wouldn't have your coat of the black or the blue If it wasn't for the work of the weavers.

A confident bunch, those weavers :).

There are engineers who seem to be focused on the mere plumbing behind applications: DBs, ORMs, web frameworks, REST, SOAP, you name it. When asked to implement a particular solution to a real world problem these developers tend to first argue about whether to use PostgreSQL, MySQL or WhateverDB without even trying to understand the actual problem first. I know this sounds very clichéd but quite a few developers seem to try very hard to live up to the cliché.

Believe it or not, in some areas this attitude is almost pervasive. I'd say it's the main reason why recruiting freelance developers mostly works by recruiters matching TLAs instead of developers pitching their services to clients directly (like design agencies do).

Anyway, this kind of developers might indeed have a hard time finding a job in 5 years but there will - save for a possible technological singularity - always be the need for people who can fathom a real problem and design a solution.

The most common reason for failure I've seen seems to stem from the idea that a website requires a developer due to a website requiring massive amounts of meticulously written text in an esoteric language; by replacing this text with a graphical interface, a website no longer requires a developer who understands how to write this text. Experience leads me to believe a developer serves a much different purpose in building websites.

Consider applying this logic to another problem, such as writing. If one builds a tool allowing non-writers to drag correctly spelled words and punctuation onto a page, then a non-writer now has the ability to write gripping novels, impactful research papers, and influential editorials -- and they can do this without knowing how to spell. This doesn't make sense, of course, since writing a book requires a certain understanding of how to communicate effectively, an achievement demanding a much more clever tool.

Much like writing a book, writing software also demands a much more clever tool than a graphical, drag-and-drop interface. Developers understand more than how to write text in odd languages; they understand how to solve problems. Creating a graphical interface for building websites doesn't remove the necessity of a developer. On the contrary, it creates more jobs for more developers who specialize in building applications using a drag-and-drop interface.