Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

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 as a subject in school teaches you

Does it? My encounters with it at any place of formal education have all been about memorizing and practicing arbitrary operations. No intuition required.

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

#152

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #91

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’…

My mom taught programming in the 80s, and the first thing she told students was: "Computers are stupid. They only do exactly what you tell them to do." People have to get over the misconception that computers can think. Maybe it was easier in the days of DOS, because merely using a computer required the same precision.

I occasionally teach programming love this line.

It's doing exactly what you're telling it to do.

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

#153

Post by drunkpotato » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

Jira isn't nearly as bad as it's made out to be, only because it's so, so, so much worse. It makes simple things obtuse and absurdly difficult, all in the name of flexibility that is more liability than feature. I hate Jira with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns.

I've used a bespoke ticketing system. I've used Trello. I've used stickies on a whiteboard. They each had their pros and cons, but every single one of them was infinitely better than the shithole that is Jira.

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

#154

Post by nameisname » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

That's a weird thing to despise. You know it's not necessary to try and put everything on a level playing field. I don't think your argument is valid on that front because when you code, you're inputting code. Nobody says "I'm going to do some text based programming" unless there's a need for that distinction in that situation. I think low code and no code are perfectly valid because you're inputting no or close to no code to achieve the task.

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

#155

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

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…

Jira is overloaded, a bit slow and a bit glitchy. But lots of software is. I tend to think that people mostly hate Jira because it reminds them of their dysfunctional processes and work in general.

Personally, from my work experience, I despise Visual Studio and Outlook a lot more (Jira is clearly trying to be usable compared to these).

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

#156

Post by civilized » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

For those who are skeptical of no-code/low-code, I am too, but here's perhaps a useful intuition pump / prompt for thought.

Excel is a low-code tool backed by a scripting language for customization (VBA). There's no argument that this tool has enormous business value and is basically never, ever going away. So, what can't Excel do, and does it make sense for there to be another low-code tool that fills those niches? What's in the space between "can be done in Excel" and "must be done by professional software engineers"?

Here are some tools I think fit the bill: Airtable, Alteryx, Looker...

(I kind of hate Alteryx at my company but it's not the software's fault, it's the company being stingy with licenses which makes people's workflows harder to learn about)

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

#157

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

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 have trouble seeing your argument. People are stupid?

You may be surprised to see how good people are in their respective domains.

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

#158

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

I expect that this is largely down to a fundamental UX mismatch of what's easy and what's not. You could probably "force" (encourage) some good practices rather easily by just making it easier to use them than to not use them. Backups would be a good example. This doesn't necessarily work for more complex things, but it seems to me (I am not very experienced with them) that a large part of these low code tools is exactly about making easy solutions like a hacked-up Excel sheet production-grade by doing the complex plumbing (like backups) for you.

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

#159

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

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…

> trying to undo that mess decades later

This implies that it has been used (successfully) for decades. That's a phenomenal success. Most software gets replaced after a few decades because the requirements change.

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

#160

Post by tempacct3575 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

nameisname wrote: post #154

tempacct3575 wrote: post #147

I've worked with several of these tools: Power Platform, Mendix, and Outsystems. I despise the terms no code-and low-code. A better term is "visual programming" (as an alternative to text based programming). You should still follow some basic software development principles - Outsystems training in particular is excellent in this regard. There definitely is an appetite for these tools. There is a class of business/op…

That's a weird thing to despise. You know it's not necessary to try and put everything on a level playing field. I don't think your argument is valid on that front because when you code, you're inputting code. Nobody says "I'm going to do some text based programming" unless there's a need for that distinction in that situation. I think low code and no code are perfectly valid because you're inputting no or close to n…

The main reason I despise it is that the term is often used to imply that there is "no technical debt" or "no maintenance costs" or that this is "not real programming". In reality, users are still creating software, so technical debt and other maintenance costs will still build over time. Project management, feature prioritization, data/schema design, system design, module decomposition, testing, etc are all still important tasks and don't go away just because the tools are visual.

A lot of it is due to perceptions - in my experience senior non-tech managers misunderstand the term, whereas "visual programming" still emphasizes that this is a software project with all that entails, just constructed in a more accessible way.